The Scope of Hindi WH

Abstract

In recent years, substantive work has been done on question formation strategies in the languages of North India. Hindi question formation has been investigated, for example, by Davison (1984, 1988, 1994), Gurtu (1985), Mahajan (1987, 1990, 1993), Bains (1990) and Srivastav (1990, 1991a, 1991b). Dasgupta (1980) and Bayer (1990, 1993) deal with Bangla questions and Wali (1988) with questions in Kashmiri and Marathi. The primary focus of these studies is to accommodate certain locality effects manifested by wh in-situ in these languages within the principles of universal grammar. In this chapter I look at Hindi wh in-situ, drawing on my own previous work (Srivastav 1990, 1991a) as well revisions and modifications prompted by the work of other scholars. I show that the scope properties of Hindi wh in-situ can be explained in terms of the phrase structure of the language if subjacency is recognized as a constraint on LF movement as well as S-structure movement.