On projection and the shadow of [wh]

Abstract

Much work has shown that wh-movement is subject to several kinds of locality restrictions cross-linguistically. I propose that these restrictions arise when [wh] projects past the maximal projection that it came from. When this happens, it intervenes for whmovement, trapping the wh-element in its base position, unless it can escape through other means. The need to escape the domain of [wh] is proposed to capture the distribution of successive-cyclic movement and interactions with Voice in different languages. Different locality conditions in different languages are captured by different distributions of the same features and probes.