What's within wh-words

Autor(en)

Dalina Kallulli, Sabine Laszakovits

Abstrakt

Taking our cue from Bayer and Brandner (2008), in this squib we investigate the feature composition of so-called (morphologically) “simplex” wh-elements in German, e.g. wer ‘who’ or was ‘what’, versus “complex” wh-elements with internal structure, e.g. ‘how many’, ‘for which student’. We show that simplex wh-elements do not contain any features other than [+wh]; in particular, they do not contain the features D (including its sub-features Person, Number, and Gender), Case, nor Animacy. This approach makes correct predictions on at least two accounts: (i) headless relatives are headed by simplex wh-words, and not by relative pronouns, due to the lack of features of the antecedent; and (ii) combined with Roberts’s (2010) theory of head movement, we derive the data of Bavarian and Alemannic doubly-filled complementizers reported in Bayer and Brandner (2008), which despite (possibly cross-generational) speaker variation, crucially also represent our own grammar.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Sprachwissenschaft

Publikationsdatum

01-2021

ÖFOS 2012

602004 Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/51489491-f3a2-4bfe-8ba6-fc6764bd0036