Issues in the morphosyntax of wh-elements

This dissertation presents studies in the distribution of wh-elements in different languages and across different constructions, with a focus on Romance and Germanic languages. The main theoretical goal of this dissertation is to provide analyses for the lexical and morphosyntactic properties of wh-elements under a minimalist framework of generative syntax. Chapter 2 attempts to develop an analysis for two distributional properties of wh-elements that prima facie seem conflictual: (a) the availability of wh-elements across different constructions; and (b) their paradigmatic (or construction-specific) distribution. I argue that an account of property (a) can be minimally achieved if wh-elements have a lexical entry that bears a wh-feature encoding an underspecified semantics. This lexical entry may moreover bear contextual features that are licensed at the Sensory-Motor interface under particular morphosyntactic conditions, accounting for property (b). Part of the Chapter is then devoted to formulating the relevant licensing conditions in Interrogatives, Free Relatives, and Headed Relatives. Chapter 3 focuses on the paradigmatic distribution of Italian che ‘what’ in Headed Relatives. The main paradigmatic property that the analysis developed in this Chapter attempts to capture is the restriction of relative che to direct case gaps. This property distinguishes relative che from interrogative che as well as other relativizers, which are instead compatible with oblique case gaps. The Chapter moreover discusses the restriction of relative che to finite environments, another property distinguishing relative che from interrogative che. While these properties have standardly been taken as evidence for the different categorial status of relative che (labeled as a C) on the one hand, and of interrogative che and other relativizers (labeled as DPs) on the other, I argue that there lacks sufficient empirical support for this categorial distinction. I thus argue that relative che is a DP, on a par with other interrogative and relative elements, and that its paradigmatic properties arise at S-M due to language-specific conditions on externalization. More specifically, the incompatibility of relative che with oblique gaps is argued to be due to the lexical entry for cui ‘what.OBL’, which replaces che in oblique contexts under the Elsewhere Principle. The restriction to finite environments for relative che is argued to be part of a larger generalization that precludes bare DPs from occurring at the edge of Infinitival Relatives. Chapter 4 develops an analysis for the distribution of relativizers in the Headed Relatives of English and Romance. It attempts to provide an account for the observation that that the overt distribution of relativizers is subject to different morphosyntactic conditions (e.g., obligatory pied-piping) depending on the kind of Headed Relative in which the wh-element is merged (i.e., tensed (non-)restrictive or infinitival), and of the source of variation between English and Romance. The analysis builds on Richards (2010) by arguing that the distribution arises at S-M due to a condition prohibiting the realization of multiple occurrences of the same feature (the Distinctness Condition). However, Richards’s account faces some empirical difficulties, which I attempt to resolve by adopting a different set of assumptions than Richards’. I will therefore assume that the locality domain relevant for the computation of Distinctness, EXT, includes the whole phase (Bošković 2016), rather than only its complement, as in standard Phase Theory (e.g., Chomsky 2001). I moreover argue that Distinctness in Romance (and in English, to some extent) is sensitive to φ-features as well as to categorial labels. I further extend the analysis to cover the distribution of ‘complementizers’ under their treatment as DPs. Finally, Chapter 5 discusses two constructions that feature the multiple realization of a single wh-phrase: (i) wh-doubling in North Italian Varieties; and (ii) wh-copying in varieties of German and Dutch. Despite standard assumptions about the derivation of wh-copying, I will argue that IM is not involved in deriving these constructions. The main argument in favor of this assumption is empirical: under an IM derivation, the copies in the wh-chain are expected to be morphophonologically identical, which is often not the case from a cross-linguistic perspective. The proposed analysis thus takes the overt wh-copies to be drawn from the Lexicon independently (i.e., via EM), giving a straightforward account for their often non-identical morphophonological shape. The unavailability of IM in these constructions is argued to arise as a consequence of the wh-phrases projecting their label at the edge of the v/C phase, leading to their freezing in those positions. The independently generated copies are then connected via Chomsky’s (2021) rule of FormCopy, allowing them to be part of the same chain at C-I. The Chapter concludes with some remarks on language variation in the availability of (patterns of) wh-doubling/copying.