On the Treatment of Multiple-Wh-Interrogatives in Minimalist Grammars

As shown by Michaelis (2001a,b), Stablerian Minimalist Grammars (MGs) (Stabler 1997b, 1998, 2008) belong among the class of mildly context-sensitive grammar formalisms as, e.g., characterized in Joshi et al. 1991. Crucially, mild context-sensitivity depends on what may—somewhat loosely—be referred to as resource-sensitivity, i.e., strictly limited combinability of syntactic objects. Within MGs, resource-sensitivity is implemented in terms of feature checking: each structure-building operation must consume (i.e. check and eliminate) features. In addition, the number of features of identical type accessible to an operation at a given stage of a derivation is strictly bounded. The core MG-constraint enforcing such an upper bound on available resources is the so-called Shortest Move Condition (SMC), which—in its most rigid version—allows no more than one feature of a given type to be available for attraction by some category requiring dependency formation. Consider the pair of German wh-interrogatives in (1).