Successive cyclicity as residual wh-scope marking [An article from: Lingua]

This digital document is a journal article from Lingua, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
We argue that the syntactic structure of wh-scope marking questions understood in the sense of the Indirect Dependency Approach (Dayal, 1994) is utilized in standard long-distance wh-questions, with some important differences at the derivational level. In essence, long-distance questions involve an (abstract) wh-scope marker which initially forms a constituent with an embedded clause. Long-distance wh-movement becomes possible when the (abstract) wh-scope marker is able to undergo incorporation with the matrix verb, 'freeing up' the path for the wh-phrase originating in the embedded clause, to proceed beyond a finite clause boundary. The proposal formalizes a long-standing intuition behind an intuitive notion of 'bridgehood', and enables us to provide a simple and conceptually appealing explanation to the effect of 'successive cyclicity' in wh-movement, which has long resisted a satisfactory explanation in the literature. It also allows us to explain a near complementarity of the 'long-distance' and 'wh-scope marking' strategies in languages of the world, stating the relevant parameter in terms of lexical properties of wh-scope markers.