Across many languages, multiple sluicing obeys a clausemate constraint. This can be understood on the empirically well-supported assumption that covert phrasal wh-movement is clause-bounded and subject to Superiority. We provide independent evidence for syntactic structure at ellipsis site locality constraints movement operations within site. The fact distribution of substantially narrower than...

This paper discusses some microvariation found in main clause wh-questions in Norwegian dialects, where V2 (verb-second) word order occurs alongside non-V2. The microvariation is related to the type of wh-constituent present and is argued to represent different stages of a diachronic development (see also Vangsnes 2005, Westergaard 2005). The paper investigates a corpus of spontaneous speech fr...

We describe a set of supervised machine learning experiments centering on the construction of statistical models of WH-questions. These models, which are built from shallow linguistic features of questions, are employed to predict target variables which represent a user’s informational goals. We report on different aspects of the predictive performance of our models, including the influence of ...

The current study used head mounted eyetracking to examine the time course and nature of processing filler-gap relations in wh-questions, and the role of verb argument frame information. Subjects listened to a short narrative while viewing pictures of entities mentioned in the story and answered an auditorily presented question; eye movements in response to these questions were recorded. In Exp...

Cross-linguistically, questions frequently make crucial use of morphosyntactic elements which also occur outside of questions. Chief among these are focus, disjunctions, and wh-words with indefinite semantics. This paper provides a compositional account of the semantics of wh-, alternative, and polar questions in Yucatec Maya (YM), which more or less consist solely of these elements. Key to the...

Based on spontaneous speech data from adults and children in an acquisition corpus, this paper discusses ‘optional’ verb-second (V2) word order in wh-questions in present-day Norwegian dialects, arguing that the variation is due to a diachronic change in progress. The argument is based on the nature of the variation and the frequencies with which the different wh-questions are attested in typic...

The intonation of Greek wh-questions consists of a rise-fall followed by a low plateau and a final rise. With acoustic data, we show (1) that the exact contour shape depends on the length of the question, and (2) that the position of the first peak and the low plateau depends on the position of the stressed syllables, and shows predictable adjustments in alignment depending on the proximity of ...