There is a puzzling asymmetry in English with respect to free relative clauses introduced by what and who, with the former (e.g. [What Glenn said] didn’t make much sense) intuitively being much more acceptable than the latter (e.g. [Who Glenn married] didn’t make much money). In this squib, we explore this degraded acceptability of who free relative clauses, and from the results of an experimen...

Parasitic Gaps (PGs) are now familiar objects on the syntactic landscape. A PG is an empty category in a Case-marked NP position that shares with Wh-trace the property of being A-bar bound but differs from Wh-trace insofar as it appears to bave the privilege of occuring in positions that are in some sense inaccessible to movement. Thus the PG in (1,2) (represented as ~) appears in a position th...

The current paper reports on the grammatical structure and discourse role of demonstrative clefts found in spontaneous, spoken language. Constructions such as that s what I think or this is where he s coming from, previously placed under the umbrella of reversed wh-clefts, are shown to exhibit significant differences from these. The inspection of 200,000 words of informal conversation excerpts ...

Previous studies on the intonation of wh-in-situ questions in French have focused mainly on the utterance final movement and ignored the prosodic properties of the region preceding the wh-constituent. Yet, these latter properties are particularly interesting from a processing perspective, as they may help the listener anticipate a question before the wh-word is reached, which might facilitate p...

Abstract This article describes the usage of partial interrogatives without wh such as And you went…? in French and Spanish, analyses variation between in-situ -Ø in-situ-wh -interrogatives went where? On basis an analysis -Ø-interrogatives a corpus spoken these are described particularly efficient means realizing information request. Due to fact that their use is bound contexts which request h...

Contra previous uniform approaches for wh-phrases, the current paper argues that there is a clear asymmetry between in-situ argument and adjunct wh-phrases with respect to Intervention Effects (IEs) in Korean and Japanese. Based on the categorical (nominal vs. adverbial) dichotomy evidenced by structural case attachment tests and formation of complex wh-expressions, different base locations for...

Two experiments investigated the acceptability of multiple questions. As expected, sentences violating the Superiority Condition were accepted less often than sentences obeying it. The status of the Superiority violations was not improved by the addition of a third wh, regardless of whether the third wh was an adjunct or an argument, though it was improved by the addition of a second question (...

This paper re-examines the wh-copying phenomenon that is attested in a number of languages including German, Frisian, Afrikaans, and Romani, in the context of Chomsky's (1998, and later) phase-based approach to syntactic derivation. Wh-copying is traditionally thought to provide strong evidence for the successive-cyclic nature of wh-movement. Besides the more general problem of how intermediate...

Compared to typically developing children, children with autism (ASD) show delayed production of wh-questions. It is currently controversial the degree to which such deficits derive from social-pragmatic requirements and/or because these are complex grammatical structures. The current study employed the intermodal preferential looking (IPL) paradigm, which reduces social-pragmatic demands. The ...