Q-movement in wh-in-situ languages

As argued in Cheng (2009:767), “one of the most fascinating aspects of wh-in-situ is that the in-situ wh-items, though in-situ, can take wide scope, on a par with moved wh-items”. The question on how wh-constituents can be licensed in their

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argument position in wh-in-situ languages like Chinese or Japanese, as illustrated in (2-3), has received much attention in the literature (see Huang 1982; Cheng 1991; Watanabe 1992a; Tanaka 1998, 1999a,b; Hagstrom 1998; Shimoyama 2001;

Sternefeld 2001; Kishimoto 2005; Cable 2007, 2008a, 2010, among many others).5

One quite fascinating issue about wh-in-situ languages, which is particularly important for our Q-based approach, is that they do not show sensitivity to island violations, as opposed to languages with overt wh-fronting. Since Ross (1967), it has been observed that in wh-fronting languages wh-adjuncts cannot be extracted from an island, (13), in contrast with wh-arguments, whose extraction does not lead to so strong ungrammaticality, (14):

(13) a. * Whyi do you wonder [CP whether John left ti]? (English)

b. * Whyi do you believe [DP the claim that John said Bill left ti]?

[adopted from Lasnik & Saito 1992:50] (14) a. ?? _What

i do you wonder [CP whether John bought ti]? (English)

b. ?? _Who

i do you believe [DP the claim that John said Mary saw ti]?

[adopted from Lasnik & Saito 1992:50] In contrast, in wh-in-situ languages the wh-items are allowed to appear inside

islands, as exemplified by the following example from Japanese:6

(15) Mary-wa [DP [CP John-ni nani-o ageta] hito-ni] atta-no? (Japanese)

Mary-NOM John-DAT what-ACC gave man-DAT met-Q

*‘What did Mary meet the man who gave _ to John?’

[adopted from Hagstrom 2000:3]

5 _{In the literature there are two main directions in solving the wh-in-situ challenge. On one}

approaches, wh-in-situ is simply interpreted by LF in its argument position, which implements that syntactic wh-movement is not indispensable for getting interrogative semantics (Tsai 1994; Shimoyama 2001). On an alternative view, wh-in-situ is licensed by some syntactic operation which does not affect word order. In this line, some approaches argue for the existence of covert movement (Huang 1982; Bošković 2000; Cheng & Rooryck 2000), while others opt for some non- covert-movement alternatives such as absorption or unselective binding (Baker 1970; Higginbotham & May 1981; Pesetsky 1987), remnant movement (Kayne 1994; Munaro, Poletto & Pollock 2001; Uribe-Etxebarria 2002) or movement of an interrogative Q-particle (Watanabe 1992a,b; Hagstrom 1998; Kishimoto 2005). In this dissertation, I adopt the Q-based approach to

wh-movement (Cable 2007, 2010) that derives from the latter type of view on wh-in-situ.

6 _{The apparent insensitivity of wh-in-situ languages to wh-island effects leads Huang (1982) to}

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However, certain parallelism between wh-ex-situ and wh-in-situ languages can still be noted, as evidenced by the examples in (16) from Japanese. Namely, observe that the wh-item modified by ittai (lit. ‘one body’; similar to ‘the hell’) cannot appear in a complex DP, as in (16a), and adjuncts like naze ‘why’ are generally sensitive to islands even without ittai, as shown in (16b):

(16) a. * Mary-ga [DP [CP John-ni ittai nani-o ageta] hito-ni] atta-no?

Mary-NOM John-DAT the-hell what-ACC gave man-DAT met-Q

‘What on earth did Mary meet [the man [who gave _ to John]]?’

b. * Mary-ga [DP [CP John-ni naze hon-o ageta] hito-ni] atta-no?

Mary-NOM John-DAT why book-ACC gave man-DAT met-Q

‘Why Mary met [a man who gave John a book _]’

[from Pesetsky 2003:8] Watanabe (1992a) analyses this non-uniform crosslinguistic picture of

wh-movement and proposes that in both types of languages movement is always

overt. The author proposes that what moves is not a wh-phrase itself, but an operator, Op. In English, the operator comes together with the wh-word (being overtly realized as the /wh-/ component of wh-words) and cannot be separated from it; as a result Op-movement always entails wh-movement. In contrast, in Japanese, the operator can detach from the wh-word and move alone, leaving the latter in-situ.

Watanabe’s proposal implies that wh-questions involve overt movement of the operator in both types of languages; thus, in principle, both are subject to Subjacency effects (cf. Huang 1982). However, Japanese has at its disposal a way to avoid islands by separating the operator and the wh-item and moving only the former. Crucially, Watanabe’s account opens up an alternative way of solving the

wh-in-situ challenge, in place of covert wh-movement (Huang 1982). On this view,

movement is overt, although what overtly moves is not a wh-phrase, but a different element: an operator (Watanabe 1992a,b), a feature (Pesetsky 2000; Watanabe 2001, 2002, 2006) or a particle (Hagstrom 1998; Kishimoto 2005; Cable 2007, 2010).

Hagstrom (1998) takes Watanabe’s (1992) proposal further and argues that, in addition to the interrogative C and the wh-word, there is a third participant in

wh-questions, a question particle Q. According to the author, what actually

undergoes overt movement in Japanese questions is the Q-particle, phonetically realized as ka. This particle, which forms indefinites from wh-words such as dare ‘who’ or nani ‘what’ (which result in dare-ka ‘someone’ and nani-ka ‘something’), can be also doubled as a question marker in wh-questions. Hagstrom argues that

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in root wh-questions, the particle ka must raise to the right edge of a clause from a position adjacent to the wh-in-situ, as in (17a), while in embedded wh-questions,

ka must be fronted to the right edge of the subordinated CP, as in (17b):

(17) a. John-ga nani-o kaimasita ka. (Japanese)

John-NOM what-ACC bought-polite Q

‘What did John buy?’ [from Hagstrom 1998:38]

b. John-ga [CP Mary-ga nani-o katta ka] sitteiru.

John-NOM Mary-NOM what-ACC bought Q know

‘John knows what Mary bought.’ [from Hagstrom 1998:16]

In order to account for the challenging fact that in Japanese wh-words are allowed to appear inside islands (cf. (15)), Hagstrom argues that in contexts of islands ka can be base-generated away from the wh-word. As a result, it starts its movement up to C from outside the island:

(18) Taroo-ga [DP Hanako-ni nani-o ageta hito-ni ] ti aimasita kai?

Taroo-NOM Hanako-DAT what-ACC gave man-to met Q

‘What did Taro meet [the man that gave _ to Hanako]?’

[from Hagstrom 2000:6] Thus, (15) and (18) are grammatical because movement of Q does not cross any island. Let us now turn back to the puzzling example in (16a), where the wh-item modified by ittai ‘the hell’ cannot appear inside the island. According to Hagstrom, ittai marks the base position of the particle ka. Since in (16a) ittai appears inside the island, it means that the Q-particle has moved out from inside the island, leading to the ungrammaticality of the sentence. That is, a wh-item can be contained inside an island if and only if the Q-particle is merged outside the island.

In sum, Hagstrom (1998) argues that the derivation of wh-questions in

wh-in-situ languages is underlined by overt Q-movement: the Q-particle is

adjoined to a wh-phrase or some larger projection, XP (see also Kishimoto 2005 for Sinhala). Then, the head C probes for the features of the Q-particle, and, once they agree, the Q-particle has to move up into Spec,CP alone, leaving its sister XP in-situ. This derivation is represented below:

24 (19) CP CP Qi TP C XP Agree XP Qi

…wh… Internal Merge [adopted from Cable 2010:37]