Embedded Questions and the Scope of WH Phrases

Abstract

While all languages have some mechanism for posing constituent (WH) questions, they vary in the mechanisms chosen. English, like many languages, is analyzed as having WH movement in both the syntax and LF: a questioned constituent normally moves into Spec(C), a syntactic position that indicates its semantic scope. Only one WH phrase is allowed in Spec(C) at S-structure, however, and other WH movement takes place in LF. Chinese and Japanese (Huang 1982; Lasnik and Saito 1984), in contrast, do not have syntactic WH movement; all WH phrases are in situ in the surface structure of these languages. Polish (Toman 1981; Lasnik and Saito 1984) takes a sort of middle ground: it requires all WH phrases to move to an A’ position above IP, but does not allow extraction from indicative clauses (see Lasnik and Saito, fn. 6); WH phrases in CP therefore occur in a position that both differs from their D-structure position and may not necessarily correspond to their semantic scope. Yet other variants are found in Slavic languages described by Rudin (1988): WH movement may be exclusively syntactic, so that all WH phrases are fronted to their scope position at S-structure, either to Spec(C) or adjoined to IP.