Licensing long-distance wh-in-situ in Malayalam
Author(s)
Aravind, Athulya
Download11049_2017_9371_ReferencePDF.pdf (287.0Kb)
PUBLISHER_POLICY
Publisher Policy
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Terms of use
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
It is generally thought that wh-in-situ, like overt movement, is potentially unbounded. At the same time, certain languages have been argued to disallow long-distance wh-in-situ. This paper argues that even in languages that show apparent clause-boundedness effects, wh-in-situ, like wh-movement, can in principle cross an arbitrary number of clauses. Failure to license a wh-phrase across a clause boundary, when it occurs, can be shown to result from the interaction between wh-agreement and independent operations affecting embedded clauses. Evidence will be drawn primarily from Malayalam (Dravidian), which has been argued to disallow long-distance wh-in-situ with finite embedded clauses. I will show that the relevant factor for wh-licensing is not finiteness, but Ā-movement of embedded clauses, an operation that is common with finite CPs. The core of the problem lies in the fact that interrogative C is a generalized [Ā]-probe that can interact with a number of featurally more specific goals, including the [Ā]-features on the head of the moving clause. It will be shown that this approach can account for a number of facts about Malayalam wh-question formation, including selective transparency of certain finite clauses for long-distance wh-licensing.
Date issued
2017-07Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and PhilosophyJournal
Natural Language & Linguistic Theory
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Citation
Aravind, Athulya. “Licensing Long-Distance Wh-in-Situ in Malayalam.” Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, vol. 36, no. 1, Feb. 2018, pp. 1–43.
Version: Author's final manuscript
ISSN
0167-806X
1573-0859