A New Diagnostic for Cyclic Wh-Movement: Discourse Particles in German Questions

Wh-Questions in ASL: A Case for Rightward Movement

This report presents an analysis of wh-movement in American Sign Language in which moved wh-phrases occur in a rightward specifier of CP position. Evidence is based on straightforward word order facts and on the distribution of non-manual wh-marking, which displays the same patterns and systematicity as other non-manual syntactic markings. We had presented an analysis in terms of rightward wh-m...

Wh-Expletives and Secondary Predication: German Partial Wh-Movement Reconsidered

In German, complex wh-interrogatives can optionally be formed by inserting the 3 person neuter wh-pronoun was in the matrix (Spec,CP) position, instead of long-distance wh-raising. It is generally assumed that 'expletive' was serves as a placeholder for a contentful whexpression lower down in the sentence, which substitutes for it at the level of semantic interpretation. It can be shown, howeve...

A Syntactic Analysis of Wh-questions in German

WH-questions without WH-words

Such WH-less WH-Questions (let us call them WLWQs) are very often used as questions in written tests or uttered by quizmasters in quizzes, though not often in daily conversations. 2 I assume that, despite their restriction in the range of registers, WLWQs are also constrained by the knowledge of human language. To my knowledge, there has been no previous research on WLWQs in the field. This pap...

Focus in Greek wh-questions

We present an analysis of multiple focus sentences in Greek. On an empirical level, we show that the current generalisation in the Greek literature that multiple focus is unavailable in Greek is too strong as it stands. What is unavailable is multiple maximal foci in sentences where one focused item has moved to the left periphery. We view the unavailability of multiple foci in such sentences a...