The goal of this paper is to examine Wh-islands effects in Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian (SC) and constructions in which SC must have Wh-movement. The starting point will be Rudin’s (1988) seminal paper on the structure of multiple Wh-fronting (MWF) constructions in Bulgarian and SC. In section 1 of the paper I briefly summarize Rudin’s (1988) analysis as well as a modification of Rudin’s analys...

Questions have been analyzed in Estonian information dialogues with the purpose of finding out the linguistic features that can be used in automatic recognition of various types of questions. Information questions (i.e. the questions that are used for requesting information) and questions that initiate solving communication problems are considered. The study shows which types of questions (wh-q...

Though there is a huge amount of the so-called epistemic logics that deal with propositional attitudes, i.e., sentences form “a knows P”, their ‘wh-cousins’ who what P is”, which Ps are Qs”, etc., have been, to best my knowledge, almost neglected. A similar disproportion can be observed between analysis Yes-No questions, has been under scrutiny many erotetic logics, and Wh-questions dealt just ...

Abstract Since the early days of generative grammar, the study of "unbounded dependencies" such as wh-questions and relative clauses has occupied a central place in both syntactic theory and language processing research. The problem that such constructions pose is as follows. In a normal wh-question, a wh-phrase is typically displaced to the left periphery of a clause (What did you say - to Joh...

English main-clause wh-questions form complementiser phrases with wh-words preposed to spec-C position. This is because English wh-words, as verb-complements originally, are strong enough to trigger wh-movement and auxiliary inversion. Persian EFL learners encounter an over-differentiation problem regarding the acquisition of auxiliary inversion rule in English standard questions. Once they hav...

This study investigates two types of clausal structures in American Sign Language (ASL), “rhetorical” whquestions and doubling constructions. Following work by Petronio (1993), I assume the stance that rhetorical wh-questions are pseudoclefts (wh-clefts). Unlike languages that use focus particles or relative clause-like structures, here ASL achieves the semantic properties of a cleft by moving ...

Abstract Although often used as diagnostic tools in discourse studies, irregular wh -questions English, which take the form of what/how about … ? and if , have not received sufficient attention terms their semantic syntactic properties. This article investigates from perspectives. Semantically, there is a topic-comment relationship between wh- word rest sentence. Syntactically, an -question nei...

To highlight relevant information in dialogues, both wh-question context and pitch accent in answers can be used, such that focused information gains more attention and is processed more elaborately. To evaluate the relative influence of context and pitch accent on the depth of semantic processing, we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) to auditorily presented wh-question-answer pairs. A s...

This study explored Wh question comprehension in Hebrew-speaking children with syntactic SLI (S-SLI), comparing which and who questions and subject and object questions. The participants were 14 Hebrew-speaking children with S-SLI aged 9;3-12;0, and the control group included 25 typically developing children aged 9;1-10;0. The study used two binary picture selection tasks. The results indicated...