This paper quantitatively evaluates the empirical claim that adding a third wh-phrase to object-initial multiple-wh-questions increases their acceptability (e.g., Bolinger 1978, Kayne 1983)—a claim that posed a problem for accounts of the subject/object asymmetry in multiplewh-questions (e.g., Chomsky 1973, 1993; Lasnik & Saito 1984; Pesetsky 1987, 2000; Richards 2001). Recently, Clifton et al....

This paper reports a series of formal acceptability-judgment experiments designed to investigate the syntactic properties of a relatively understudied type of wh-dependency: multiple wh-questions in English. By using a factorial definition of island effects made available only by formal experiments, we report an unpredicted pattern of acceptability that suggests the existence of reverse island ...

This study explores whether the generativist account, specifically integration theory, could explain children’s percentage of errors in questions general and it also applies to yes-no non-subject wh-question. The current adopts a corpus-based method compare 2-to-3-year-old percentages (and wh-question separately) including auxiliary DO HAVE. results show that rate is higher than HAVE, which app...

The purpose of the present study was to determine whether early bilingual Basque-Spanish speakers, who acquired Spanish by the age of 5, comprehend Spanish wh-dependences as effortlessly as native Spanish speakers. Given that Basque and Spanish are structurally different languages, we hypothesized that predictive processing strategies from the first language (L1) would interfere with predictive...

(6) Whoi do you know [thati you can really trust]? (7) Which argumenti do you know [thati Sandy thought was unconvincing]? One could assume that the contrast illustrated in (1) to (5) can be accounted for by considering the grammaticalized discourse functions of the dislocated phrases. In the ungrammatical cases in (2) and (5), the dislocated phrase can be considered a grammaticalized topic – ...

The formation of wh-questions in Northern Norwegian seems to be an example of a syntactic phenomenon which necessarily refers to phonological structure, namely the prosodic weight of the wh-expression. The subject and verb are ‘inverted’ after polysyllabic wh-expressions, but they are not inverted after monosyllabic ones. These data are discussed in the context of Pullum & Zwicky’s (1988) hypot...

This paper discusses different approaches to language acquisition in relation to children's acquisition of word order in wh-questions in English and Norwegian. While generative models assert that children set major word order parameters and thus acquire a rule of subject-auxiliary inversion or generalized verb second (V2) at an early stage, some constructivist work argues that English-speaking ...

relation to children's acquisition of word order in wh-questions in English and Norwegian. While generative models assert that children set major word order parameters and thus acquire a rule of subject-auxiliary inversion or generalized verb second (V2) at an early stage, some constructivist work argues that English-speaking children are simply reproducing frequent wh-word + auxiliary combinat...

This paper discusses an item-based and a rule-based model of language acquisition in relation to children's acquisition of word order in wh-questions in English and Norwegian. Constructivist work argues that English-speaking children are sensitive to wh-word + auxiliary combinations in the input, while generative work asserts that children acquire a rule of subject-auxiliary inversion or genera...