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What do Wh-imperatives tell us about Wh-movement?

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Abstract

This paper is concerned with two variants of Wh-movement, +Wh-question-movement and topicalization. Drawing on German material, we argue that they crucially differ as to the features of the landing sites: Wh-question movement is movement of +Wh-phrases into A-bar positions marked by +Wh, which assigns clausal scope to the +Wh-phrases; topicalization is movement of XP-phrases into A-bar positions unmarked by +Wh.

Since +Wh-phrases are also XP-phrases, our account predicts that +Wh-phrases may undergo not only +Wh-question movement, but also topicalization, i.e., that they can be Wh-moved without the scope effects typical of +Wh-interrogatives. This prediction is borne out by the existence of Wh-imperatives in German, i.e., long distance extractions of ±Wh-phrases into imperative clauses, which we discuss in detail. It is shown that +Wh-imperatives presuppose complements with an initial +Wh-phrase, which is topicalized into the matrix clause, thus showing conclusively that scope assignment is independent of Wh-movement.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Deutsches Seminar, Universität Tübingen, Wilhelmstr. 50, D-7400, Tübingen, Germany

    Marga Reis

  2. Tyska Institutionen, Lunds Universitet, Helgonabacken 14, S-22362, Lund, Sweden

    Inger Rosengren

Authors
  1. Marga Reis
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  2. Inger Rosengren
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Additional information

We are grateful to J. Geilfuß, T. N. Höhle, J. Pafel, C. Platzack, and I. Zimmermann, as well as D. Pesetsky and three anonymous NLLT reviewers for valuable discussion, comments and criticisms. We should also like to thank the participants of various workshops in Berlin, Lund, and Tübingen, where we had the opportunity of discussing earlier versions of this paper.

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Reis, M., Rosengren, I. What do Wh-imperatives tell us about Wh-movement?. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 10, 79–118 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00135359

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00135359

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