Discourse-Conditioned Wh-Placement in Natural Language
type: CreativeWork
description: 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-phras…
abstract: 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-phras…
author: Ren, Fangning
language: eng
keywords: comparative syntax, D-linking, focus, information structure, wh-placement
license: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/3f4c5682-7fae-46a7-b2ec-160cb4c85495/download
license: http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved
date published: 2025-06-02
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:20Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.122272