Discourse-Conditioned Wh-Placement in Natural Language
This dissertation presents a typological investigation of discourse-conditioned wh-placement in natural languages, focusing on wh-ex-situ in wh-in-situ languages (Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Turkish) and wh-in-situ in wh-movement languages (Greek, Italian, French, Spanish). Standing at the interface of syntax and information structure, I approach this word order variation with a notion initially adopted in distinguishing the inherent interpretative difference between English which-complexes and other wh-nominals such as what—D(iscourse)-linking (Pesetsky, 1987). The unified explanation I will provide for the availability of these two variants of wh-placement is that the variables bound by these wh-phrases must range over a restrictive set of alternatives that are either saliently specified in the prior utterance or viewed as familiar to both interlocutors. Crucially, such interpretive restrictions are absent for wh-phrases appearing in the default positions of these languages (except for the inherently D-linked which-phrases). I begin by thoroughly examining the Mandarin D-linked wh-ex-situ questions and presenting evidence to substantiate three key proposals. First, the gapped wh-dependency derived by movement encodes existential presupposition and conventionally implicates three types of contrastive focus. I propose that both of these effects are made possible due to the unvalued, interpretable [FOC D-LINGKING] feature in the Foc⁰ head which triggers the wh-fronting. Second, D-linking serves as a precondition for wh-nominals to take an ex-situ position and the analysis of this property is best incorporated into a Split-DP structure (Guardiano, 2012; Roberts, 2017). By reapplying the feature-valuation approach of Agree (Pesetsky & Torrego, 2007) that we adopt at the CP level to head movement (Roberts, 2010) within DP, I propose that the D-linkability of a wh-nominal is contingent on whether the wh-item can be exponed at D; the wh-item of a wh-phrase can be base generated in D, as in the case of na ‘which’-complexes, or optionally undergo head movement from n to D, as in the case of shenme ‘what’-complexes. Lastly, I propose that Mandarin D-linked wh-ex-situ construction is subcategorised into the gapped and the resumptive wh-dependencies, with the former identified as wh-focus movement, and the latter involving a hidden prolepsis construction where the wh-phrase is base-generated in an A position—Spec,RP, predicating over a complement clause containing a coreferential correlate (Lohninger, Kovač, & Wurmbrand, 2022). The wh-phrase further undergoes topic movement to the LP of the matrix domain, conveying a contrastive topic interpretation, which also hinges on D-linking (Büring, 2003). Turning to the cross-linguistic investigation of D-linked wh-placement in four other wh-in-situ languages and four wh-movement languages, I intend to shed light on how this phenomenon can be shaped by both universal principles and language-specific parameters. Drawing on a set of parameters designed based on the surface patterns, the syntactic properties and the interpretive properties associated with this non-canonical question formation, I tentatively propose a typological implication: languages, if not all, have both wh-ex-situ and wh-in-situ at their disposal in terms of forming genuine information-seeking questions; it is the D-linking property of the wh-phrase that makes the non-canonical word order possible.
comparative syntax, D-linking, focus, information structure, wh-placement
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