This research is case study which was designed to investigate the acquisition of WH-question byPersian and English speaking children between 2 to 4 years old. Four girls and their input wereprecisely analyzed in order to figure how WH-questions are effective in their speaking in theirdaily lives. In the current study the subjects were randomly selected and the matter of gender wasnot considered...

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...

Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are known to be licensed in wh-questions. But not all wh-questions behave alike with respect to NPI licensing. As pointed out in Han and Siegel (1996), while all argument wh-questions with NPIs can have a RHETORICAL QUESTION reading, only a subset of them can have a true wh-question reading. In this paper, we point out that adjunct wh-questions with NPIs cannot ha...

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...

How should one understand knowledge-wh ascriptions? That is, how should one understand claims such as ‘‘I know where the car is parked,’’ which feature an interrogative complement? The received view is that knowledge-wh reduces to knowledge that p, where p happens to be the answer to the question Q denoted by the wh-clause. I will argue that knowledge-wh includes the question—to know-wh is to k...

Given this state of affairs, two question immediately arise: what exactly are the positions to which Wh-phrases are moving and what the driving force behind this movement is. Rudin (1988) argues that the Wh-phrase which is the first in the linear order moves to SpecCP, while others are adjoined to IP. The movement of the first Wh-phrase can be taken to be an instance of familiar Wh-movement to ...