This paper is about the semantics of wh-phrases. It is argued that wh-phrases should not be analyzed as indefinites as, for example, Karttunen (1977) and many others have done, but as functional expressions with an indefinite core —their function being to restrict possible focus/background structures in direct or congruent answers. This will be argued for on the basis of observations made with ...

The processing of Japanese wh-questions was investigated using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Unlike in English or German, a wh-element in Japanese need not be displaced from its canonical position, but instead needs a corresponding Q(uestion)-particle to indicate its interrogative scope. We tested to see if there were any processing correlates specific to these features of Japanese wh-...

This study investigated different accounts of children's acquisition of non-subject wh-questions. Questions using each of 4 wh-words (what, who, how and why), and 3 auxiliaries (BE, DO and CAN) in 3sg and 3pl form were elicited from 28 children aged 3;6-4;6. Rates of noninversion error (Who she is hitting?) were found not to differ by wh-word, auxiliary or number alone, but by lexical auxiliary...

The present study compared the impact of teacher-provided and peer-provided oral assistance in the acquisition of English wh-question forms. Participants were 90 female Iranian EFL learners who constituted the 3 groups of the study: teacherassisted, peer-assisted, and a control group. Participants in the experimental groups received assistance either from the teacher or a peer during task-based...

The current study used headmounted 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. At the end of the story, they were required to answer an auditorily presented question; eye movements in response...

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...

This study investigated question production in agrammatic aphasia, focusing on the comparison between Wh questions and yes/no questions and on the interaction between the question production deficit and language-specific properties. A total of 16 agrammatic aphasics (13 Hebrew speakers, 2 Palestinian Arabic speakers, and 1 English speaker) participated in the study, which included sentence elic...

This paper proposes a structural analysis of two types of wh-question formation in the Austronesian languages Seediq and Tagalog. Wh-questions formed on arguments are pseudo-cleft constructions; the wh-word functions as a predicate taking the rest of the clause, in the form of a headless relative, as its subject. The restriction that argument wh-questions can only be formed on absolutives is ac...

By discussing a novel paradigm, it is shown that the likeliness of an operator to trigger an intervention effect in a wh-in-situ question is determined by the logical properties of that operator (contra Beck 1996a, 2006, for instance). A new empirical generalization accounting for the differences between operators in their ability to cause intervention and improving on existing analyses is sugg...