Journal articles: 'Multiple wh-questions'

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Rudin, Catherine. "On multiple questions and multiple WH fronting." Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 6, no. 4 (November 1988): 445–501. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/bf00134489.

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Nunes, Jairo. "Edge Features and Multiple Wh-Questions." Cadernos de Linguística 2, no. 1 (April 23, 2021): 01–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.25189/2675-4916.2021.v2.n1.id316.

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Building on Chomsky’s (2000) proposal that A’-movement is triggered by an EPP-type of feature added to phase heads and Bošković’s (2007) proposal that the relevant feature is to be found on the moving element itself, Nunes (2020) has argued that these two apparently conflicting views ultimately instantiate different grammatical options available at UG. He shows that much of the crosslinguistic variation regarding single wh-questions hinges on whether edge features (features that trigger successive cyclic A’-movement) are lexically associated with wh-elements or phase heads and whether the edge features are intrinsically valued or unvalued. In this paper, I extend this approach to multiple wh-questions, showing that these factors also derive the basic typology of multiple wh-questions found in natural languages.

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Grewendorf, Günther. "Multiple Wh-Fronting." Linguistic Inquiry 32, no. 1 (January 2001): 87–122. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/002438901554595.

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This article argues that overt multiple wh-fronting in languages like Bulgarian consists of moving a single wh-cluster to [Spec, CP]. The formation of wh-clusters is motivated by the assumption that wh-elements can act as landing sites for wh-movement due to morphological properties of wh-words. I further argue that languages such as Japanese constitute covert instances of this process of wh-cluster formation, accounting for intricate constraints on multiple wh-questions such as the so-called “additional-wh effect.” Another central claim of the article is that despite appearances, multiple wh-questions in German equally involve the formation of wh-clusters, which are shown to consist of one visible and one or more invisible wh-elements. This analysis provides a new account for the lack of “short” and the presence of “long” superiority effects in German.

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Dotlacil, Jakub, and Floris Roelofsen. "A dynamic semantics of single-wh and multiple-wh questions." Semantics and Linguistic Theory 30 (March 2, 2021): 376. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/salt.v30i0.4839.

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We develop a uniform analysis of single-wh and multiple-wh questions couched in dynamic inquisitive semantics. The analysis captures the effects of number marking on which-phrases, and derives both mention-some and mention-all readings as well as an often neglected partial mention-some reading in multiple-wh questions.

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Voznesenskaia, Anastasiia. "Wh-questions in Balkar." Proceedings of the Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic 5, no. 1 (December 29, 2020): 163. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/ptu.v5i1.4785.

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This paper deals with the properties of wh-questions in Balkar. It is shown that wh-in-situ structures in Balkar are island insensitive (with an exception of coordinate structures). I discuss the complement/adjunct asymmetry regarding intervention effects. I also consider embedded multiple wh-structures. In this paper, I discuss a puzzle that the Balkar data presents to the prominent theories of wh-questions, which do not explain the properties it shows.

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Gribanova, Vera. "Structural Adjacency and the Typology of Interrogative Interpretations." Linguistic Inquiry 40, no. 1 (January 2009): 133–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/ling.2009.40.1.133.

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I point out that the generally accepted theory of single-pair versus pair-list readings for multiple wh-questions in the Slavic family, as instantiated in Bošković 2001a, predicts the wrong result for Russian multiple wh-questions and for coordinated multiple wh-questions in several languages. I suggest a reformulation of the connection between the structure and the interpretation of multiple wh-questions that relies on the structural adjacency of two or more wh-items at LF, and I discuss a number of cases in which this reformulation appears to make the right predictions for multiple wh-questions containing clitics.

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OBA, YUKIO. "EMPTY CATEGORY PRINCIPLE AND MULTIPLE WH-QUESTIONS." ENGLISH LINGUISTICS 6 (1989): 52–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.9793/elsj1984.6.52.

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Clifton, Charles, Gisbert Fanselow, and Lyn Frazier. "Amnestying Superiority Violations: Processing Multiple Questions." Linguistic Inquiry 37, no. 1 (January 2006): 51–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/002438906775321139.

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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 (e.g., and when).Further, in a small pilot study directly comparing a sentence with adjacent final wh-phrases that may induce a stress clash (I'd like to know who hid it where when) with a sentence violating Superiority but avoiding the final adjacent wh-phrases (I'd like to know where who hid it when), half the participants indicated that the Superiority violation sentence sounded better.This suggests that the status of some additional-whsentences may appear to improve simply because the comparison sentence with adjacent final wh-phrases is degraded.Overall, the results of the studies suggest that there is no need to complicate syntactic theory to account for the additional-wh effect, because there is no general additional-wh effect.

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Bošković, Željko. "On the interpretation of multiple questions." Linguistic Variation Yearbook 2001 1 (December 31, 2001): 1–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/livy.1.03bos.

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The paper shows that crosslinguistically, overt movement of a wh-phrase to SpecCP results in the loss of the single-pair interpretation for multiple questions, i.e. it forces the pair-list interpretation. It is shown that the damaging effect of overt movement to SpecCP on the availability of single-pair answers can be accounted for with an extension of Hagstroms (1998) semantics of questions to languages with overt wh-movement. More precisely, the effect is argued to follow from Relativized Minimality: In questions with a single-pair interpretation, the Q morpheme, which is base-generated below C, induces a relativized minimality effect when a wh-phrase crosses it on its way to SpecCP.

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Bošković, Željko. "On Multiple Wh-Fronting." Linguistic Inquiry 33, no. 3 (July 2002): 351–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/002438902760168536.

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I show that multiple wh-fronting languages (MWFL) do not behave uniformly regarding wh-movement and eliminate MWFL from the crosslinguistic typology concerning wh-movement in multiple questions. Regarding when they have wh-movement, MWFL behave like non-MWFL: some behave like English (they always have wh-movement), some like Chinese (they never have it), and some like French (they have it optionally although, as in French, wh-movement is sometimes required). MWFL differ from English, Chinese, and French in that in MWFL even wh-phrases that do not undergo wh-movement still must front for an independent reason, argued to involve focus. The fronting has several exceptions (semantic, phonological, and syntactic in nature), explanation for which leads me to posit a new type of in-situ wh-phrase and argue for the possibility of pronunciation of lower copies of chains.

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Li, Haoze. "Reference to dependencies established in multiple-wh questions." Semantics and Linguistic Theory 31 (January 5, 2022): 262. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/salt.v31i0.5124.

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In discourse, a universal statement establishes a dependency between sets of objects, which can support the evaluation of singular pronouns in a subsequent sentence. Two well-known phenomena involving such reference to a dependency are quantificational subordination and telescoping. This paper argues that a multiple-wh question admitting a pair-list answer can support subordination and telescoping, just like universal statements. Accordingly, the relevant phenomena are classified into two kinds of reference to dependencies, called ‘question subordination’ and ‘question telescoping’, which exhibit different properties. A dynamic family-of-questions analysis is developed to account for these phenomena. Briefly, a multiple- wh question generates a set of sub-questions, i.e., a family of questions, and then the set is transformed into a set of possible pair-list answers. Following Dynamic Plural Logic, the family of questions and possible pair-list answers encode different kinds of dependencies. Accessing the dependency encoded in a possible pair-list answer gives rise to question subordination, whereas accessing the dependency encoded in the family of questions gives rise to question telescoping.

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Kotek, Hadas, and Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine. "Covert Pied-Piping in English Multiple Wh-Questions." Linguistic Inquiry 47, no. 4 (October 2016): 669–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00226.

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In this article, we argue for the existence of covert pied-piping in wh-questions through a previously unnoticed pattern of intervention effects in Superiority-obeying English multiple wh-questions. We show that the preference of covert pied-piping, unlike that of overt pied-piping, is for movement of larger constituents. We argue that this discrepancy stems from conflicting requirements of PF and LF: overt pied-piping feeds both LF and PF, but covert pied-piping feeds LF only. The study of covert pied-piping thus reveals the true preference of LF and narrow syntax with regard to pied-piping: larger pied-piping constituents are preferred over smaller ones. This preference can be overridden by certain PF constraints that apply to overt pied-piping.

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Li, Haoze, and Candice Chi-Hang Cheung. "Focus intervention effects in Mandarin multiple wh-questions." Journal of East Asian Linguistics 24, no. 4 (August 4, 2015): 361–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10831-015-9134-1.

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Vuksanovic, Jasmina, Irena Avramovic-Ilic, and Jovana Bjekic. "Comprehension of exhaustive wh-questions of typically developing preschool children." Zbornik Instituta za pedagoska istrazivanja 44, no. 2 (2012): 368–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.2298/zipi1202368v.

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Wh-questions are among the most important and the most frequent types of utterance, which presumably reflects the role of questions in everyday life in gathering various types of information. There is a limited body of research on the exhaustivity comprehension in multiple wh-questions in children (such as, for example, Who drives what, Who gives something to whom?). However, previous results suggest that exhaustivity emerges at the age of four, although there is considerable variability depending on the language. In this paper two aims were proposed: first, to explore when typically developing Serbian speaking monolingual children comprehend exhaustivity property within multiple wh-questions, and, second, cognitive relevancy of structural complexity of multiple wh-questions. 40 typically developing Serbian speaking monolingual children subdivided in three age groups from 3,6 - 7,1 years participated in this study. The question-after-picture test, which consists of 20 tasks with pre-vocabulary check, was used. The tasks were classified according to complexity index into paired and triple wh-questions. Results indicate that children acquire comprehension of exhaustive wh-questions gradually, first in paired wh-questions and then in triple wh-questions. The research provides data on language development, and also offers guidelines for diagnostic and clinical work with children with specific language impairment.

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Nguyen, An Duy, and Géraldine Legendre. "Covert movement in English probing wh-questions." Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 5, no. 1 (March 23, 2020): 180. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v5i1.4696.

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Besides fronted information-seeking questions, English also allows for two types of wh-in-situ ones: echo questions, which are used to request a repetition or a clarification of a previous utterance, and probing questions, which are often used in quiz shows, classroom settings, and child-directed speech to “prompt” the addressee for an answer. An acceptability judgment task shows that PQs with multiple wh-phrases get a significantly lower acceptability score than echo questions with multiple wh-phrases despite their similarity in surface structure, which suggests a syntactic difference below the surface. Independent syntactic evidence confirms the result and further suggests that while echo questions involve no syntactic movement (Dayal, 1996), probing questions involve covert wh-movement.

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Chen, Run. "The superiority effect in Albanian multiple wh-movement structures." Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 5, no. 1 (March 23, 2020): 623. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v5i1.4735.

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This study examines the order of wh-phrases in Albanian multiple wh-questions. Despite SVO and OVS orders, I argue that Albanian wh-movement displays the superiority effect, through a mechanism generating a rightmost highest specifier. OVS order constructions are subject to the haplology effect and word order freezing, showing the presence of a multiple wh-fronting step in the derivation. The study highlights a general observation concerning opacity and the cross-linguistic wh-question environment. Linear order does not reveal hierarchical structure, as a typically leftmost wh-phrase is pronounced rightmost. This rightward wh-movement analysis may explain future findings of languages claimed to not display the superiority effect.

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Varnava, Marina, and Kleanthes K. Grohmann. "Developments in the acquisition of Wh-interrogatives in Cypriot Greek." Linguistic Variation 14, no. 1 (November 25, 2014): 69–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lv.14.1.04var.

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This cross-sectional study investigates the acquisition of the interpretation of syntactic and semantic aspects of wh-questions by Cypriot Greek-speaking children aged 4 to 9 years. Two experimental tools were employed, a question–picture-matching task examining the comprehension of D-linked and non-D-linked questions for subject and object, and a question-after-picture task examining the comprehension of the notion of exhaustivity in single and multiple wh-questions. The results from these experiments are interpreted in light of current theoretical advances and cross-linguistic comparisons. The apparent discrepancies found in the development of Greek Cypriot children’s comprehension of wh-questions and exhaustivity are put in perspective with their particular linguistic environment – diglossia, in which children grow up with two varieties, Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek. Keywords: bilectalism; D(iscourse)-linking; first language acquisition; multiple wh-questions; single wh-questions

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Martin, Joshua. "D-linking and the semantics of wh-in-situ." Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 6, no. 1 (March 20, 2021): 448. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v6i1.4981.

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Theories of pair-list readings of multiple wh-questions commonly posit an interpretive asymmetry between the fronted and in-situ wh-phrases, where the fronted wh-phrase is argued to function as the sortal key, have a requirement to be interpreted exhaustively, or be obligatorily D-linked. To clarify the empirical landscape of such debate, I present three experiments which tease apart the effects of these often-confounded discourse factors on the order and interpretation of multiple wh-questions. They are found to have either inconsistent or insignificant effects, arguing against a unique discourse-sensitivity of the fronted wh-phrase. Theories of questions which encode such an asymmetry should accordingly be revised.

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Myung-Kwan Park. "Locality and Edge Effects in Korean Multiple Wh-questions." Korean Journal of Linguistics 43, no. 3 (September 2018): 523–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.18855/lisoko.2018.43.3.007.

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Yeun-Jin Jung. "Coordinated Multiple Wh-questions in Wh-in-situ Languages: A Mono-Clausal Movement Analysis." Studies in Generative Grammar 28, no. 1 (February 2018): 91–125. http://dx.doi.org/10.15860/sigg.28.1.201802.91.

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Kotek, Hadas. "Intervention, covert movement, and focus computation in multiple wh-questions." LSA Annual Meeting Extended Abstracts 4 (May 7, 2013): 23. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/exabs.v0i0.797.

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Lipták, Anikó. "Strategies of wh-coordination." Linguistic Variation 11, no. 2 (December 31, 2011): 149–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lv.11.2.02lip.

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This paper presents an overview of the cross-linguistically available strategies used in the formation of questions with coordinated wh-expressions. It offers a systematic characterization of the existing surface patterns of wh-coordination and the syntactic strategies underlying these, and presents typological generalizations on the distribution of these strategies, based on a cross-linguistic survey involving 12 languages. It will be pointed out that languages can be classified into four types according to the availability of coordinated wh-questions in them and that these four types can make use of at least six distinct syntactic strategies for the derivation of wh-coordination. The availability of these strategies will be shown to be limited by the syntactic typology of wh-questions. Keywords: wh-questions; coordination; ellipsis; sharing; (multiple) wh-movement

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Ballena, Constantino T. "Qualitative Research Interviewing: Typology of Graduate Students' Interview Questions." Philippine Social Science Journal 4, no. 3 (October 25, 2021): 96–112. http://dx.doi.org/10.52006/main.v4i3.376.

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This paper is a corpus linguistics research that examined the typology of questions asked by graduate students who did papers that solely followed qualitative research interviewing. Corpus linguistics is a methodological approach employed to analyze patterns of language use in naturally occurring texts. The paper investigated the breadth and structure of the interview questions and the unproductive questions found in the corpus. The corpus consisted of 7,516 interview questions examined following the structure-breadth-function typology of questions as a framework. The corpus was analyzed by identifying the patterns of the interview questions for these to be properly typologized. Results revealed that Wh- questions (5,365 of the 7,516 questions or 71.381%) were the most frequently asked interview questions, followed by the yes-no questions (1,455 or 19.359%). Tell-Explain-Describe or TED questions (6 or 0.106%) had the least frequency of occurrence. Additionally, closed-ended questions (3,977 or 52.914%) were more prevalent than open-ended questions (3,539 or 47.086%). While a total of 802 prefaced questions were identified with so-prefaced questions as the most pervasive (446 or 56.611%). Finally, the study results showed that leading and multiple questions constituted the unproductive interview questions, the latter being the most preponderant with 700 or 55.556% of the 1,260 unproductive questions. The subcategorizations yes-no and wh- leading questions; and multiple yes-no, multiple yes-no-wh-, and multiple wh- (serial and single) questions are nowhere to be found in the available literature on interview questions, thus adding to the value of the present study. The quality of qualitative research interviewing is facilitated by the typology of questions interviewers asked based on the structure and breadth of the questions. Generally, the wh- open-ended type is the more appropriate one in qualitative research interviewing.

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Liakin, Denis. "Les questions multiples : le débat continue." Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 52, no. 3 (November 2007): 279–312. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s000841310000431x.

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AbstractIn this article we offer an alternative analysis of multiple questions in Russian that is not only related to topic and focus, but also to other discourse factors. The characteristics that put Russian is the same group as Chinese and Japanese also apply to other multiple wh fronting languages such as Bulgarian, Romanian, and Serbo-Croatian, which, according to previous classification, belong to two different groups. We argue that multiple wh fronting languages can be classified on the basis of the presence of a functional category D-WhP in the left periphery of the matrix or embedded clause. This category is related to the discourse and the speaker’s intentions—one of the wh phrases is more important to the speakers than the others.

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Kandybowicz, Jason, Bertille Baron Obi, Philip T. Duncan, and Hironori Katsuda. "Documenting the Ikpana interrogative system." Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 42, no. 1 (May 1, 2021): 63–100. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jall-2021-2016.

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Abstract This article provides a comprehensive treatment of the interrogative system of Ikpana (ISO 639-3: lgq), an endangered language spoken in the southeastern part of Ghana’s Volta region. The article features a description and analysis of both the morphosyntax and intonation of questions in the language. Polar questions in Ikpana are associated with dedicated prosodic patterns and may be segmentally marked. As for wh- interrogatives, Ikpana allows for optional wh- movement. Interrogative expressions may appear clause-internally in their base-generated positions or in the left periphery followed by one of two optionally droppable particles with distinct syntactic properties. In this way, wh- movement structures are either focus-marked constructions or cleft structures depending on the accompanying particle. We identify an interesting wh- movement asymmetry – unlike all other wh- movement structures, ‘how’ questions may not be formed via the focus-marked or cleft strategy. We document a number of other attested wh- structures in the language, including long-distance wh- movement, partial wh- movement, long-distance wh- in-situ, and multiple wh- questions. We argue that by allowing our documentation efforts to be shaped and guided by theoretically driven research questions, we reach deeper levels of description than would have been possible if approached from a purely descriptive-documentary perspective.

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Kandybowicz, Jason, Bertille Baron Obi, Philip T. Duncan, and Hironori Katsuda. "Documenting the Ikpana interrogative system." Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 42, no. 1 (May 1, 2021): 63–100. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jall-2021-2016.

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Abstract This article provides a comprehensive treatment of the interrogative system of Ikpana (ISO 639-3: lgq), an endangered language spoken in the southeastern part of Ghana’s Volta region. The article features a description and analysis of both the morphosyntax and intonation of questions in the language. Polar questions in Ikpana are associated with dedicated prosodic patterns and may be segmentally marked. As for wh- interrogatives, Ikpana allows for optional wh- movement. Interrogative expressions may appear clause-internally in their base-generated positions or in the left periphery followed by one of two optionally droppable particles with distinct syntactic properties. In this way, wh- movement structures are either focus-marked constructions or cleft structures depending on the accompanying particle. We identify an interesting wh- movement asymmetry – unlike all other wh- movement structures, ‘how’ questions may not be formed via the focus-marked or cleft strategy. We document a number of other attested wh- structures in the language, including long-distance wh- movement, partial wh- movement, long-distance wh- in-situ, and multiple wh- questions. We argue that by allowing our documentation efforts to be shaped and guided by theoretically driven research questions, we reach deeper levels of description than would have been possible if approached from a purely descriptive-documentary perspective.

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Chernova, Ekaterina. "On wh-movement in echo-questions and crosslinguistic variation." Beyond Philology An International Journal of Linguistics, Literary Studies and English Language Teaching 18, no. 3 (June 30, 2021): 65–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.26881/bp.2021.3.03.

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This paper examines echo wh-questions, a rather understudied phenomenon even in extensively described languages such as English. In particular, it focuses on a particular type of echo questions, such as those made in response to a previous declarative (e.g., –Mary said {mumble}./ –Mary said what?) or a previous wh-question (e.g., –Who said {mumble}?/ –Who said what?). Such structures are examined from a comparative perspective, analyzing data from three different languages regarding Multiple wh-Fronting: English vs. Russian, with attention to Spanish. On the one hand, this paper considers the key, cross-linguistically common features of echo questions and discusses their underlying derivational structure. On the other hand, contrary to the standard assumptions that echo questions necessarily require wh-in-situ, this paper focuses on the availability of different options of overt echo wh-movement among the languages under consideration. It is argued that in echo questions, similarly to what happens in canonical interrogatives, wh-movement proceeds successive-cyclically and is subject to parametric variation

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Shlonsky, Ur, Sandra Villata, and Julie Franck. "Covert Movement in Multiple‐ Wh Questions: Experimental and Theoretical Investigations." Syntax 23, no. 2 (January 20, 2020): 185–202. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/synt.12192.

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Bentea, Anamaria, and Theodoros Marinis. "Not all wh-dependencies are created equal: processing of multiple wh-questions in Romanian children and adults." Applied Psycholinguistics 42, no. 4 (April 8, 2021): 825–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0142716421000059.

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AbstractThe aim of this study was to examine the acquisition and processing of multiple who- and which-questions in Romanian that display ordering constraints and involve exhaustivity. Toward that aim, typically developing Romanian children (mean age 8.3) and adults participated in a self-paced listening experiment that simultaneously investigated online processing and offline comprehension of multiple wh-questions. The study manipulated the type of wh-phrase (who/which) and the order in which these elements appear (subject–object [SO]/object–subject [OS]). The response to the comprehension question could address the issue of exhaustivity because we measured whether participants used an exhaustive or a non-exhaustive response. Our findings reveal that both children and adults slow down when processing who- as compared to which-phrases, but only adults show an online sensitivity to ordering constraints in who-questions. Accuracy is higher with multiple who- than which-questions. The latter pose more difficulties for comprehension, particularly in the OS order. We relate this to intervention effects similar to those proposed for single which-questions. The lack of intervention effects in terms of reaction times indicates that these effects occur at a later stage, after participants have heard the whole sentence and when they interpret its meaning.

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Fedorenko, Evelina, and Edward Gibson. "Adding a Third Wh-phrase Does Not Increase the Acceptability of Object-initial Multiple-wh-questions." Syntax 13, no. 3 (August 16, 2010): 183–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9612.2010.00138.x.

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Jung-Tae Kim. "Age effect on the L2 interpretation of English multiple wh-questions." English Language Teaching 22, no. 2 (June 2010): 137–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.17936/pkelt.2010.22.2.006.

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de Villiers, Jill, Chunyan Ning, Xueman Lucy Liu, Yi Wen Zhang, and Fan Jiang. "The Acquisition of Exhaustive Pairing in Multiple Wh-Questions in Mandarin." Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 47, no. 6 (June 1, 2018): 1369–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10936-018-9588-1.

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Kotek, Hadas. "Dissociating intervention effects from superiority in English wh-questions." Linguistic Review 34, no. 2 (October 26, 2017): 397–417. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/tlr-2017-0005.

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Abstract In wh-questions, intervention effects are detected whenever certain elements – focus-sensitive operators, negative elements, and quantifiers – c-command an in-situ wh-word. Pesetsky (2000, Phrasal movement and its kin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) presents a comprehensive study of intervention effects in English multiple wh-questions, arguing that intervention correlates with superiority: superiority-violating questions are subject to intervention effects, while superiority-obeying questions are immune from such effects. This description has been adopted as an explanandum in most recent work on intervention, such as Beck (2006, Intervention effects follow from focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 14. 1–56) and Cable (2010, The Grammar of Q: Q-particles, wh-movement, and pied-piping. Oxford University Press), a.o. In this paper, I show instead that intervention effects in English questions correlate with the available LF positions for wh-in-situ and the intervener, but not with superiority. The grammar allows for several different ways of repairing intervention configurations, including wh-movement, scrambling, Quantifier Raising, and reconstruction. Intervention effects are observed when none of these repair strategies are applicable, and there is no way of avoiding the intervention configuration – regardless of superiority. Nonetheless, I show that these results are consistent with the syntax proposed for English questions in Pesetsky (2000, Phrasal movement and its kin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) and with the semantic theory of intervention effects in Beck (2006, Intervention effects follow from focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 14. 1–56).

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Dikken, Marcel den, and Anastasia Giannakidou. "From Hell to Polarity: “Aggressively Non-D-Linked” Wh-Phrases as Polarity Items." Linguistic Inquiry 33, no. 1 (January 2002): 31–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/002438902317382170.

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Pesetsky's (1987) “aggressively non-D-linked”wh-phrases (likewho the hell; hereinafter, wh-the-hell phrases) exhibit a variety of syntactic and semantic peculiarities, including the fact that they cannot occur in situ and do not support nonecho readings when occurring in root multiple questions. While these are familiar from the literature (albeit less than fully understood), our focus will be on a previously unnoted property of wh-the-hell phrases: the fact that their distribution (in single wh-questions) matches that of polarity items (PIs). We lay out the key data supporting this claim, embed the PI nature of wh-the-hell phrases in the theory of polarity developed in Giannakidou 1998, 1999, 2001, and establish the link between the lexical content of these phrases and their PI status by identifying wh-the-hell as a dependent PI. We subsequently exploit the PI status of wh-the-hell to explain the more familiar puzzles mentioned above, showing that these are not peculiarities specific to wh-the-hell but manifestations of the general properties of the class of PIs that wh-the-hell belongs to. The syntactic aspects of the polarity analysis of wh-the-hell are shown to have important consequences for the fundamental properties of wh-movement in English.

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Hawkins, Roger, and Hajime Hattori. "Interpretation of English multiple wh-questions by Japanese speakers: a missing uninterpretable feature account." Second Language Research 22, no. 3 (July 2006): 269–301. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/0267658306sr269oa.

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In recent work by Tsimpli (2003) and Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou (to appear) an explicit claim is made about the nature of end-state grammars in older second language (L2) learners: uninterpretable syntactic features that have not been selected during first language (L1) acquisition will not be available for L2 grammar construction. Interpretable syntactic features, on the other hand, remain available (as well as the computational procedures and principles of the language faculty), even those not selected by the L1. The present study investigates this hypothesis in relation to the acquisition of the uninterpretable feature that forces wh-movement in interrogatives in English. Nineteen L1 speakers of Japanese (a wh-in-situ language that lacks the movement-forcing feature) who are highly proficient speakers of English were asked to interpret bi-clausal multiple wh-questions in English (like Where did the professor say the students studied when?). Their responses were compared with those of a native speaker control group. It is argued that the results are consistent with the unavailability of the uninterpretable feature. Two conclusions are drawn: first, that there is a critical period for the selection of uninterpretable syntactic features for the construction of mental grammars; second, that despite the observation of target-like performance by L1 Japanese speakers on English wh-interrogatives reported in a number of existing studies, caution is required in interpreting target-like performance as evidence that L2 speakers have the same underlying grammatical representations as native speakers.

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Nunes, Jairo. "Agreeing and Moving across Traces: On Why Lower Copies May Be Transparent or Opaque." Philosophies 7, no. 1 (December 24, 2021): 3. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7010003.

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Within Minimalism, traces are often taken to be transparent for agreement and movement across them, which raises the question of how this could be properly accounted for within the copy theory of movement. This paper examines wh-traces in multiple wh-questions and argues that traces (lower copies) may or may not induce intervention effects depending on whether or not they are fully specified.

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Arnon, Inbal. "Cross-linguistic Variation in a Processing Account: The Case of Multiple Wh-questions∗." Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 32, no. 1 (October 17, 2006): 23. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/bls.v32i1.3437.

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Churng, Sarah. "Syntax and prosodic consequences in ASL." Nonmanuals in Sign Language 14, no. 1 (August 11, 2011): 9–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sll.14.1.03chu.

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This study investigates three different multiple wh-question types in American Sign Language (ASL). While the three are strikingly similar, subtle but systematic differences in their prosody make them semantically distinct. I derive these distinctions from their syntax, via extensions of Koopman and Szabolcsi’s (2000) remnant movement and Sportiche’s (1988) stranded movement, and I propose that multiple wh-questions in ASL involve Parallel Merge structures of the kind proposed by Citko (2005). I also present new generalizations to characterize their prosody, whereby A-bar movement gives rise to prosodic breaks and ‘prosodic resets’.

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roman, Robert Bley-V., and Naoko Yoshinaga. "The acquisition of multiple wh-questions by high-proficiency non-native speakers of English." Second Language Research 16, no. 1 (January 2000): 3–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/026765800676857467.

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This paper investigates the knowledge of multiple wh-questions such as Who ate what? by high-proficiency non-native speakers of English whose first language is Japanese. Japanese grammar is known to license a wider range of such questions than English – who came why, for example – although the precise theoretical account is not yet clear. Acceptability judgements were obtained on 6 different types of such questions. Acceptability of English examples was rated by native speakers of English, Japanese examples were judged by native speakers of Japanese, and the English examples were judged by high-proficiency Japanese speakers of English. The results for native speakers judging their own language were generally in accord with expectations. The high-level non-native speakers of English were significantly different from native speakers in their ratings of these sentences. However, the ratings were clearly not simply the result of transfer. The consequences of this finding for theories of Universal Grammar (UG) in second language acquisition (SLA) are discussed.

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Sprouse, Jon, Shin Fukuda, Hajime Ono, and Robert Kluender. "Reverse Island Effects and the Backward Search for a Licensor in Multiple Wh-Questions." Syntax 14, no. 2 (March 16, 2011): 179–203. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9612.2011.00153.x.

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Jahr, Erik. "Teaching children with autism to answer novel wh-questions by utilizing a multiple exemplar strategy." Research in Developmental Disabilities 22, no. 5 (September 2001): 407–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0891-4222(01)00081-6.

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Fleisher, Nicholas. "Than clauses as embedded questions." Semantics and Linguistic Theory 28 (October 15, 2018): 120. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/salt.v28i0.4402.

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Quantifiers in comparative than clauses often appear to take scope at the matrix level, a phenomenon that has spawned a large recent literature. Here I reopen an old line of investigation that seeks illumination in the strikingly similar behavior of quantifiers in embedded questions. A novel observation in this connection is that English clausal comparatives support quantificational variability effects. I explore the possibility of treating than clauses as embedded questions, sketching two implementations, and weigh this type of analysis against recent approaches that invoke degree pluralities. I also discuss multiple-wh configurations in clausal comparatives.

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Irurtzun, Aritz. "A Derivational Approach to Focus Structure." Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 53, no. 2-3 (November 2008): 327–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0008413100004515.

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AbstractI present a derivational analysis of the construal of the focus structure of the sentence. I propose that the [+FOCUS] feature is an optional formal feature that can be assigned to multiple tokens of the numeration. Hence, the focus structure is derived via Merge (creation of a set) in a strictly compositional way. This theory circumvents the empirical and theoretical shortcomings of Nuclear Stress Rule-based approaches, and accounts for split focus constructions (answers to multiple wh-questions).

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Kobayashi, Filipe Hisao, and Vincent Rouillard. "High and low uniqueness in singular wh-interrogatives." Semantics and Linguistic Theory 30 (March 2, 2021): 714. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/salt.v30i0.4844.

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While simple singular wh-interrogatives carry a uniqueness presupposition, this is not so when they contain possibility modals. Hirsch & Schwarz (2019) account for this contrast by assuming (i) that questions can have multiple maximally informative true answers and (ii) that uniqueness is triggered lexically inside the scope of interrogative. We show that their proposal overgenerates on two accounts. Firstly, it predicts too weak a presupposition for modalized interrogatives. Secondly, it predicts unattested interpretations for interrogatives containing negation. We show that both issues can be solved using exhaustification operators. On the one hand, we obtain the desired presupposition for modalized interrogatives by assuming the lexical trigger for uniqueness to be a presuppositional variant of an exhaustification operator (Bassi, Del Pinal & Sauerland 2019). On the other, we show that unattested readings of negation can be blocked by assuming that questions presuppose that the pointwise exhaustification of their answers partitions the context of evaluation (Fox 2019). We argue that proper empirical coverage for singular wh-interrogatives requires the interaction of both exhaustification operations.

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Neagu, Anda. "On the acceptability of multiple interrogatives in Italian." Working papers in Applied Linguistics and Linguistics at York 1 (September 13, 2021): 75–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.25071/2564-2855.8.

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Multiple interrogatives exhibit cross-linguistic variation from a typological point of view. Standard Italian, in particular, is considered to be a language disallowing these constructions, an analysis based on the interaction between whPs and focused constituents in this language. I argue that previous analyses of multiple wh-questions in Italian need to be integrated with novel data, and that these structures are at least marginally acceptable. Specifically, I illustrate data from a preliminary experiment involving acceptability judgements on a 5-point Likert scale that tested whether native Italian speakers consider multiple interrogatives acceptable. While this is still a preliminary investigation, the results indicate that younger native Italian speakers tend to accept these constructions. I suggest that the presence of two whPs within the same clause in Italian can be analyzed as a language contact phenomenon, with English being the source language, in line with the sociolinguistic literature on this topic.

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Wijayanti, Farida Indri. "CONVERSATION ANALYSIS ON THE INTERVIEW TEST OF THE INDONESIAN SOLIDARITY PARTY’S LEGISLATIVE CANDIDATES." Linguistik Indonesia 38, no. 2 (August 30, 2020): 193–211. http://dx.doi.org/10.26499/li.v38i2.163.

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Based on an analysis of 154 questions and their responses in the interview test of the Indonesian Solidarity Party’s legislative candidates, this article gives a descriptive overview of interview stages and the types of question-response that are implemented in the conversation. Conversation Analysis (CA) is applied as an approach. Data are from video recordings of naturally occurring conversation in the interview test that are retrieved from https://www.youtube.com. Relying on the data, this paper shows the generic structure of interview test (e.g., warm-up, confirmation, information exchange, and wrap-up), question types (e.g., wh-, disjunctive, declarative, tag, echo, narrative, and multiple), and types of responses (e.g., information, confirmation, marked confirmation, disconfirmation, choice of alternative answers, implication, code switched, and repetition). This paper reveals that wh-interrogative is used more commonly in the interview test than the other question types. Finally, information response in the form of clausal responses is mostly preferred by legislative candidates.

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Moshavi, Adina. "What Can I Say? Implications and Communicative Functions of Rhetorical “WH” Questions in Classical Biblical Hebrew Prose." Vetus Testamentum 64, no. 1 (January 20, 2014): 93–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15685330-12301139.

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Abstract The rhetorical question is a sentence whose meaning is that of a question, but which is used to indirectly express an assertion. This paper examines content (“WH”) rhetorical questions in classical biblical prose, classifying them according to implications and communicative goals. Rhetorical questions have one of three types of implications: negative, specific, and extreme scalar implications. The content rhetorical question is found to be a versatile conversational device in the Bible, serving a variety of distinct communicative functions which operate on multiple levels. It is directly or indirectly connected to persuasion in most of its uses. The rhetorical question is in essence an intensifier, deriving its force on the higher-level of function from the implication of obviousness. In some cases, however, the choice of a persuasive form of communication rather than a more direct strategy has the effect of mitigation on the superordinate function level.

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Leung, Tommi. "The syntax of two types of sluicing in Tamil." Linguistic Review 35, no. 1 (January 26, 2018): 35–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/tlr-2017-0017.

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Abstract Recent analyses of sluicing focus on the underlying structure of the sluiced clause, i.e. sluicing as deriving from full-fledged wh-questions, or from reduced clefts (Ross 1969, Guess who? In Robert I. Binnick, Alice Davison, Georgia M. Green & Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 252–286. Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society, University of Chicago; Merchant 2001, The syntax of silence. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press; Craenenbroeck, Jeroen van. 2010b. The syntax of ellipsis: Evidence from Dutch dialects. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press., inter alia). In this paper, we investigate two sluicing strategies in Spoken Tamil, namely case-marked (CM) and non-case-marked (NCM) sluicing. In addition to the morphological distinction with respect to the presence/absence of grammatical case on the wh-sluice, we argue that the two types of sluicing differ in the configuration of the underlying embedded CP. For CM sluicing, the sluiced clause is derived from a full-fledged interrogative CP at the underlying level, whereas the bare wh-sluice undergoes leftward wh-scrambling to the CP-initial position followed by TP-domain deletion at PF. While we contend that most A/A’-diagnostics are uninformative of the type of operation wh-scrambling in Tamil involves (contra Sarma 2003, Non-Canonical word order: Topic and focus in adult and child tamil. In Karimi Simin (eds.), Word order and scrambling, 238–272. Malden, Oxford: Blackwell), various properties of the CM wh-sluice (e.g. scope, negation, adverb placement, multiple sluicing) can still be described by postulating that the wh-sluice involves A’-scrambling. For the second type of sluicing (NCM sluicing), the sluiced clause involves a biclausal structure formed by a normal sentence and a null copular question. We claim that the NCM wh-sluice is derived from Spad (Sluicing Plus A Demonstrative), since the null copular question can be accompanied by a demonstrative, cf. English ‘John met someone, who is that?’ and Dutch spading (Van Craenenbroeck 2010b). Spad is not derived from a full-fledged interrogative CP, and therefore its wh-sluice does not involve any scrambling operation. The present analysis of Tamil sluicing refutes the claim that reduced clefts are one underlying sluicing source in Dravidian languages, and moreover invites an inquiry of whether Dravidian as a language family in the historical sense always receives a homogeneous analysis, given the immense parametric variation among branch languages. In the same vein, we contend that any claim about the ‘principles’ of Dravidian syntax must be supported by strong cross-linguistic evidence at the microscopic level.

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Panchal, Parth, Janak Thakkar, Veerapathiramoorthy Pillai, and Shweta Patil. "Automatic Question Generation and Evaluation." Journal of University of Shanghai for Science and Technology 23, no. 05 (May 28, 2021): 751–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.51201/jusst/21/05203.

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Generation of questions from an extract is a very tedious task for humans and an even tougher one for machines. In Automatic Question Generation (AQG), it is extremely important to examine the ways in which this can be achieved with sufficient levels of accuracy and efficiency. The way in which this can be taken ahead is by using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to process the input and to work with it for AQG. Using NLP with question generation algorithms the system can generate the questions for a better understanding of the text document. The input is pre-processed before actually moving in for the question generation process. The questions formed are first checked for proper context satisfaction with the context of the input to avoid invalid or unanswerable question generation. It is then preprocessed using various NLP-based mechanisms like tokenization, named entity recognition(NER) tagging, parts of speech(POS) tagging, etc. The question generation system consists of a machine learning classification-based Fill in the blank(FIB) generator that also generates multiple choices and a rule-based approach to generate Wh-type questions. It also consists of a question evaluator where the user can evaluate the generated question. The results of these evaluations can help in improving our system further. Also, evaluation of Wh questions has been done using the BLEU score to determine whether the automatically generated questions resemble closely the human-generated ones. This system can be used in various places to help ease the question generation and also at self-evaluator systems where the students can assess themselves so as to determine their conceptual understanding. Apart from educational use, it would also be helpful in building chatbot-based applications. This work can help improve the overall understanding of the level to which the concept given is understood by the candidate and the ways in which it can be understood more properly. We have taken a simple yet effective approach to generate the questions. Our evaluation results show that our model works well on simpler sentences.

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Haig, John H. "Subjacency and Japanese Grammar." Studies in Language 20, no. 1 (January 1, 1996): 53–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sl.20.1.04hai.

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It has been claimed by Hasegawa, Yoshimura, Nishigauchi, Kikuchi, Saito and Watanabe, among others, that Japanese observes subjacency in relative clause formation, question formation, topicalization, comparative deletion (all non-overt operator movements), PP-topicalization, and scrambling (overt movements). In this paper I present counterexamples to each of these claims and argue that an aboutness condition on topic-comment and focus-comment constructions not only better explains the data but also explains the fact that subjects are usually easier to relativize than non-subjects, the fact that NP-topicalization is more free than PP-topicalization and the fact that there is pressure for a "list" interpretation in multiple wh-questions.

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Journal articles on the topic 'Multiple wh-questions'

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