This article provides an overview of the issues and proposals surrounding wh-insitu since the 1980s. In particular, it discusses the question of whether or not in-situ wh-phrases undergo covert wh-movement. Aside from reviewing the basic arguments for and against covert wh-movement, it considers alternative proposals put forth, ranging from movement of elements other than wh-phrases themselves,...

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 Ma...

This paper investigates how exhaustivity in single and multiple wh-questions is acquired in German-speaking children with SLI. Comparing semantic and pragmatic accounts of exhaustivity, obligatory exhaustivity of multiple wh-questions is argued to be problematic for pragmatic approaches. Thus, a unified semantic approach is suggested$chosen that relates exhaustivity to an inherent property of t...

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 ...

Contraction of want to to wanna is subject to constraints which have been related to the operation of Universal Grammar. Contraction appears to be blocked when the trace of an extracted wh-word intervenes. Evidence for knowledge of these constraints by young English-speaking children in as been taken to show the operation of Universal Grammar in early child language acquisition. The present stu...

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...