Composing questions

by Kotek, Hadas

Type Book

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Title Statements

Full title :Composing questions / Hadas Kotek.

Summary

An investigation of the syntax and semantics of wh-questions through the lens of intervention effects, offering a new proposal on overt and covert wh -movement. In this book, Hadas Kotek investigates the syntax and semantics of wh-questions, offering a new solution to a central question in the study of interrogatives: given that overt wh-movement is cross-linguistically common, is syntactic movement a prerequisite for the interpretation of wh -phrases Some linguists argue that all wh-phrases undergo movement to interrogative C, even if covertly; others propose mechanisms of in-situ interpretation that do not require any movement. Kotek moves beyond these positions to argue that wh -in-situ does move covertly, but not necessarily to C. Instead, she contends, wh -in-situ undergoes a short movement step akin to covert scrambling. This makes the LF behavior of English parallel to the overt behavior of German. Kotek presents a series of self-paced reading experiments, alongside judgment data from German, to substantiate the idea of covert scrambling. She introduces new diagnostics for the underlying structure of questions, using as a principal tool the distribution of intervention effects. This system allows her to offer the first unified account for a range of phenomena of interrogative syntax-semantics as pied-piping, superiority effects, the cross-linguistically varied syntax of questions, and intervention effects. Kotek develops a theory of interrogative syntax-semantics; studies the phenomena of intervention effects in wh -questions, proposing that the nature of intervention is crucially tied to the availability of wh-movement in a question; and shows that covert wh -movement should be modeled as a short scrambling operation rather than an unbounded, successive-cyclic, and potentially long-distance movement operation.

Edition Statements

Publication Date:2019.

Publication Statements

Publisher(s):MIT Press
Place of Publication:Cambridge
Language:eng
Publication Date:2019.

The Physical Object

Description:1 online resource (232 pages)

Edition Identifiers

ISBN:9780262351065, 0262351064
oclc:on1082868062
LC Classification:P299.I57
Dewey Decimal:415

Intro; Contents; Series Foreword; Acknowledgments; Notation; 1. Introduction; 1.1 Questions and Their Interpretation; 1.2 Intervention Effects and Covert Movement; 1.3 Covert Wh-Scrambling; I.A Theory Of Wh-Questions; 2. Background: Wh-Questions; 2.1 Two Types of Semantics for Questions; 2.2 Two Approaches to Wh-in-Situ; 2.3 Superiority Effects; 2.4 Presuppositions and the Readings of Multiple Wh-Questions; 2.5 Appendix: Wh-in-Situ and Antecedent-Contained Deletion; 3. The Syntax and Semantics of Wh-Questions; 3.1 The Desiderata; 3.2 The Proposal; 3.3 Simplex Wh-Questions

3.4 Superiority-Obeying Multiple Wh-Questions3.5 Superiority-Violating Multiple Wh-Questions; 3.6 Quiz-Master Questions and Nested Which-Phrases; 3.7 Appendix 1: ALTSHIFT and Declarative Sentences; 3.8 Appendix 2: Wiltschko's Observation; 4. Crosslinguistic Variation in Interrogative Syntax; 4.1 Wh-Fronting Languages without Covert Movement; 4.2 Multiple Wh-Fronting Languages; 4.3 Wh-in-Situ Languages; 4.4 Combined Strategies for Question Formation; 4.5 Pied-Piping; II. Wh-Intervention Effects; 5. Intervention Effects: The State of the Art; 5.1 Some Basic Data

5.2 Intervention: An Informal Description5.3 Beck's…

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