Exclamative Wh-Phrases as Positive Polarity Items

Similarity of wh-Phrases and Acceptability Variation in wh-Islands

In wh-questions that form a syntactic dependency between the fronted wh-phrase and its thematic position, acceptability is severely degraded when the dependency crosses another wh-phrase. It is well known that the acceptability degradation in wh-island violation ameliorates in certain contexts, but the source of this variation remains poorly understood. In the syntax literature, an influential ...

Scrambling of Wh-phrases in Japanese

Despite the a priori desiratum of assimilating the derivation and interpretation of wh-questions in Japanese to that in English, empirical evidence shows that overt displacement of wh-phrases in Japanese is not the same as overt wh-movement in English. The syntax of wh-phrases in Japanese is essentially the same as that of non-wh-phrases. Failure of scope reconstruction in certain cases is not ...

A movement approach to non-local wh-Polarity Sensitive Items in Korean

1 Inherent Focus on Wh - Phrases

In the first part of the paper, I propose a framework for focus and question interpretation. While both serve to introcude alternatives, I offer reasons that the two kinds of alternatives arise on different levels of semantic interpretation. The resulting approach can correctly account for all possible constellations of focus and questions, including intervention effects, without the use of typ...

Negative and Positive Polarity Items: Variation, Licensing, and Compositionality

In this chapter, we discuss the distribution and lexical properties of common varieties of negative polarity items (NPIs) and positive polarity items (PPIs). We establish first that NPIs can be licensed in negative, downward entailing, and nonveridical environments. Then we examine if the scalarity approach (originating in Kadmon and Landman 1993) can handle the attested NPI distribution and em...