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 as an interface mismatch between interpretation and phonology. Roughly, what is unavailable is not multiple focus but multiple sentence nuclei. We couch this intuition in Büring’s (2008) analysis which provides a theory of mapping the domain of focus operators to domains of prosodic prominence. We further identify and discuss a set of previously unreported data indicating the availability of 2OF in Greek, also providing experimental data to support our analysis. The empirical data mainly involve multiple wh-questions.