In wh-questions that form a syntactic dependency between the fronted wh-phrase and its thematic position, acceptability is severely degraded when the dependency crosses another wh-phrase. It is well known that the acceptability degradation in wh-island violation ameliorates in certain contexts, but the source of this variation remains poorly understood. In the syntax literature, an influential ...

In this paper, we develop a new typology of multiple wh-questions with coordinated wh-pronouns. We motivate the existence of three distinct structures for such questions: one mono-clausal and two bi-clausal. We use four kinds of diagnostics to determine which of the three structures is available in a particular language: the availability of both multiple wh-questions and wh-questions with coord...

Prior work on wh-movement has distinguished among several types of wh-fronting languages that permit distinct patterns of overt and covert movement, instantiated for example by the Slavic languages, English, and German. This paper extends the cross-linguistic typology of multiple questions by arguing that Hebrew instantiates a new kind of wh-fronting language, unlike any that are discussed in t...

The relationship between wh prosody and wh scope in Tokyo Japanese has been both empirically and theoretically controversial. This paper examines the production and perception of wh prosody in the Fukuoka dialect. Results confirm that the characteristic wh prosodic contour and the relationship between wh prosody and wh scope identified in earlier impressionistic and small-scale empirical studie...

Mandarin Chinese WH-questions exhibit two syntactically interesting characteristics. First, WH-words that bear interrogative information always occur in situ.Second, in spite the above fact, I find that Mandarin WH-questions, with bounded WH-words, share the grammatical behaviors common to questions with unbounded and dislocated WH-words in other languages.Hence,intuitively,an account of Mandar...

Wh-phrases in Korean are ambiguous due to the lexical ambiguity of "wh" words: wh-pronouns as in a wh-question, or indefinite pronouns as in a yes/no-question. Furthermore, since a wh-word in Korean is in-situ (i.e. not moved to the front of a sentence as in English), wh-questions are not distinguished from echo questions in their surface forms. In this paper, we investigated prosodic character...