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 paper discusses some syntactic issues as to WLWQs. In the course of discussions, I try to argue among others: (i) WLWQs differ in several syntactic aspects from other reduced expressions like VP ellipsis, gapping, pseudogapping, and other shortened wh-questions (section 2); (ii) they also differ from the cleft construction despite apparent similarities in interpreation (section 3); the overtly realized parts in WLWQs are topics (section 4); they read as subjects but not as other grammatical functions like objects or adjuncts due to the principle of deletion up to recoverability, which applies to elliptical structures in general (section 5); they do not have a non-interrogative reading due to a general principle constraining information structures (section 6); and nominative (as opposed to topic) WLWQs do not exist because of the restriction on phases (Chomsky 1998) (section 6). In the appendix, I discuss a potential conceptual problem that WLWQs face with respect to the feature copying mechanism and suggest possible solutions.