It was claimed by variationists that languages experience variation at all levels, which is supposed to be patterned. The present study aimed at exploring how variation occurred in English and Persian wh-questions. More specifically, it investigated whether such a variation was systematic and patterned. To this end, a modified version of the Edinburgh Map Task was used in data collection. The p...

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...

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...

In sluiced clauses, English allows a wh-expression to be inverted around its preposition in a process called swiping, as in (1a) (Merchant 2002). I show, contrary to previous work, that swiping is not limited to ellipsis contexts: it is also permitted when the inverted (swiped) whPP is coordinated with another wh-phrase, as shown for both matrix and embedded contexts in (1b-c), both from the in...

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...

lf as the grammatical locus of semantic interpretation in minimalism implies that lf is the only level at which any structural condition can be checked. accordingly, cross over effects provides some evidence for the existence of lf. to provide further evidence for the universality of cross over effects at lf, a comparative research between persian-english, turkish-english and persian-turkish ha...

This paper discusses some microvariation found in main clause wh-questions in Norwegian dialects, where V2 (verb-second) word order occurs alongside non-V2. The microvariation is related to the type of wh-constituent present and is argued to represent different stages of a diachronic development (see also Vangsnes 2005, Westergaard 2005). The paper investigates a corpus of spontaneous speech fr...