The paper discusses the so-called adverbial use of the wh-pronoun was (‘what’), which establishes a non-standard interrogative construction type in German. It argues that the adverbial use of was (‘what’) is based on the lexical properties of a categorically deficient pronoun was (‘what’), which bears a causal meaning. In addition, adverbial was (‘what’) differs from canonical argument was (‘wh...

It is well known that indefinite phrases are more liberal in taking scope than other quantifying phrases. In general, the scope of indefinites is not limited by the finite clause in which they occur, although the scope of universal quantifiers is. Wh-phrases behave very much like indefinites: in languages with wh in situ, their scope need not be restricted by anything like clause boundedness. I...

We provide a new definition of the linear prominence constraints between pronouns and operators (wh-words and quantifiers) which correctly rules out examples that violate weak crossover. Previous analyses of weak crossover relied on the presence of a trace in the extraction site of a wh-question; in contrast, our analysis enables a traceless account of examples previously cited in support of tr...

This paper addresses two central issues related to the problem of auxiliary inversion in English wh-questions: 1) there are multiple proposals of the source of the error but none can explain the data in full; 2) the data on children’s wh-questions are inconsistent, due to differences in methods and techniques. We propose that language-specific structural characteristics of the target grammar (e...

This study examined the postulate that training production of syntactically complex sentences results in generalization to less complex sentences that have processes in common with treated structures. Three agrammatic aphasic patients were trained to produce wh-movement structures, object clefts and/or object extracted who-questions, while generalization between these structures was tested. One...

This paper tests claims that children with Grammatical(G)-SLI are impaired in hierarchical structural dependencies at the clause level and in whatever underlies such dependencies with respect to movement, chain formation and feature checking; that is, their impairment lies in the syntactic computational system itself (the Computational Grammatical Complexity hypothesis proposed by van der Lely ...

The primary proposal of this thesis that in questions, a “Q” morpheme must undergo syntactic movement from a clause-internal position to a clause-peripheral position. Throughout this thesis, we develop a syntactic analysis and a semantic formalism for questions that accounts for the facts observed in wh-in-situ languages (focusing mainly on Japanese, Sinhala, Shuri Okinawan, and premodern Japan...

In behavioral studies on sentence comprehension, much evidence indicates that shorter dependencies are preferred over longer dependencies, and that longer dependencies incur a greater processing cost. However, it remains uncertain which of the various steps involved in the processing of long-distance dependencies is responsible for the increased cost of longer dependencies. Previous sentence co...

(2)a. main interrogatives (both yes/no and wh-questions); b. wh-exclamatives, expressing an emotionally salient attitude of the speaker, and yes/no exclamatives, expressing the speaker’s negative presupposition with respect to the propositional content, which is presented as unexpected; c. optatives expressing the speaker’s wish, in which the realization of a counterfactual propositional conten...

Most linguistic theories since Chomsky (1973) have hypothesized that longdistance dependencies crossing multiple clauses are mediated by intermediate structures. This paper provides a new source of evidence for the existence of such intermediate structures: reading times during online sentence comprehension. The experiment presented here compares reading times for two structures involving the l...