Composing Questions

Description

An investigation of the syntax and semantics of wh-questions through the lens of intervention effects, offering a new proposal on overt and covert wh-movement. In this book, Hadas Kotek investigates the syntax and semantics of wh-questions, offering a new solution to a central question in the study of interrogatives: given that overt wh-movement is cross-linguistically common, is syntactic movement a prerequisite for the interpretation of wh-phrases? Some linguists argue that all wh-phrases undergo movement to interrogative C, even if covertly; others propose mechanisms of in-situ interpretation that do not require any movement. Kotek moves beyond these positions to argue that wh-in-situ does move covertly, but not necessarily to C. Instead, she contends, wh-in-situ undergoes a short movement step akin to covert scrambling. This makes the LF behavior of English parallel to the overt behavior of German. Kotek presents a series of self-paced reading experiments, alongside judgment data from German, to substantiate the idea of covert scrambling. She introduces new diagnostics for the underlying structure of questions, using as a principal tool the distribution of intervention effects. This system allows her to offer the first unified account for a range of phenomena of interrogative syntax-semantics as pied-piping, superiority effects, the cross-linguistically varied syntax of questions, and intervention effects. Kotek develops a theory of interrogative syntax-semantics; studies the phenomena of intervention effects in wh-questions, proposing that the nature of intervention is crucially tied to the availability of wh-movement in a question; and shows that covert wh-movement should be modeled as a short scrambling operation rather than an unbounded, successive-cyclic, and potentially long-distance movement operation. Contents Series Foreword Acknowledgments Notation 1. Introduction 1.1 Questions and Their Interpretation 1.2 Intervention Effects and Covert Movement 1.3 Covert Wh-Scrambling I. A Theory Of Wh-Questions 2. Background: Wh-Questions 2.1 Two Types of Semantics for Questions 2.2 Two Approaches to Wh-in-Situ 2.3 Superiority Effects 2.4 Presuppositions and the Readings of Multiple Wh-Questions 2.5 Appendix: Wh-in-Situ and Antecedent-Contained Deletion 3. The Syntax and Semantics of Wh-Questions 3.1 The Desiderata 3.2 The Proposal 3.3 Simplex Wh-Questions 3.4 Superiority-Obeying Multiple Wh-Questions 3.5 Superiority-Violating Multiple Wh-Questions 3.6 Quiz-Master Questions and Nested Which-Phrases 3.7 Appendix 1: ALTSHIFT and Declarative Sentences 3.8 Appendix 2: Wiltschko’s Observation 4. Crosslinguistic Variation in Interrogative Syntax 4.1 Wh-Fronting Languages without Covert Movement 4.2 Multiple Wh-Fronting Languages 4.3 Wh-in-Situ Languages 4.4 Combined Strategies for Question Formation 4.5 Pied-Piping II. Wh-Intervention Effects 5. Intervention Effects: The State of the Art 5.1 Some Basic Data 5.2 Intervention: An Informal Description 5.3 Beck’s (2006) Theory of Intervention Effects 5.4 On the Surviving Single-Pair Reading of “Intervened” Questions 6. Intervention Correlates with Movement Possibilities For Wh-in-Situ 6.1 Intervention in Superiority-Obeying Questions 6.2 Missing Intervention Effects in Superiority-Violating Questions 6.3 Intervention Is an LF Phenomenon III. Covert Wh-Scrambling 7. Covert Wh-Movement as Covert Scrambling 7.1 Intervention Effects in Multiple Wh-Questions with Islands 7.2 Covert Movement and the Nature of Syntactic Derivations 7.3 Evidence for Covert Wh-Scrambling 7.4 Some Consequences 8. Processing Evidence for Covert Scrambling 8.1 Three Approaches to Covert Movement 8.2 Experimental Background 8.3 Experimental Evidence for Covert Scrambling 8.4 A Hamblin Semantics with Covert Scrambling 8.5 Appendix: Materials for Experiments 1–3 9. Epilogue Notes Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 References Index