Wh-Questions in English and Chinese: A Phase-Based Approach

Some Issues in English Wh-Questions: A Constraint-Based Perspective

There exist several important empirical and theoretical issues in dealing with English wh-questions. Among these are syntactic connectivity between the wh-filler and its putative gap, so-called that-trace effect, and constraints in the formation of infinitival wh-questions. Many attempts have been made to account for these, but few succeeded in obtaining satisfactory support. This paper offers ...

Language and Variation: A Study of English and Persian Wh-questions

It was claimed by variationists that languages experience variation at all levels, which is supposed to be patterned. The present study aimed at exploring how variation occurred in English and Persian wh-questions. More specifically, it investigated whether such a variation was systematic and patterned. To this end, a modified version of the Edinburgh Map Task was used in data collection. The p...

Inversion in Wh-questions in Child Romance and Child English

Covert pied-piping in English multiple wh-questions

In this paper we argue for the existence of covert pied-piping in wh-questions through a previously unnoticed pattern of intervention effects in superiorityobeying English multiple wh-questions. We show that the preference of covert pied-piping is for movement of larger constituents, unlike overt pied-piping. We argue that this discrepancy stems from conflicting requirements of PF and LF: overt...

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...