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Austronesian verb-initial languages and wh-question strategies

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Abstract

This paper presents a research agenda for investigating possible implicational universals connecting the syntactic strategy that a verb-initial language uses to derive verb-initial word order (verb raising, VP raising, verb lowering, right hand subjects, etc.) and its strategy for forming wh-questions (wh-in-situ, clefting, wh-fronting, etc.). The Austronesian language family, with its over 1000 members, is taken as a starting point for the investigation because of its abundance of verb-initial languages. The existing analyses of Austronesian languages support one potential universal in this domain: Languages that derive verb-initial word order by VP raising do not have wh-movement. Possible theoretical explanations for this pattern are evaluated. The paper then considers Fijian, a potential counterexample. Further analysis suggests that Fijian is unlikely to be a problem, however, it highlights a main claim of the paper: Careful, in-depth analyses are required to yield robust results in such a typological study.

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Potsdam, E. Austronesian verb-initial languages and wh-question strategies. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 27, 737–771 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-009-9078-0

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