Wh & wh-questions in Greek: monoclausal or biclausal?
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[1] University of Athens
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- Localización: Linguistic Analysis, ISSN 0098-9053, Vol. 37, Nº. 1-2, 2011, págs. 189-229
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
This paper examines wh & wh-questions in Greek with a twofold aim: first, to present the syntactic and semantic properties of the Greek data, and second, to investigate their syntactic derivation. Following a detailed presentation of the data, the conjunction possibilities of wh-phrases are considered. Verbal subcategorization requirements are a major factor regulating the conjunctions of wh-phrases with different grammatical functions. The relative ordering of the conjoined wh-elements is restricted when one of them is a subject, in which case the wh-subject has to precede all other question words. The readings of wh & wh-questions are different from those of both multiple questions and wh-constructions with postverbal conjunction of a second question word. Regarding the issue of syntactic derivation, I argue that monoclausal analyses do not capture the properties of the Greek data. Likewise, the predictions that follow from the backward ellipsis analysis (along the lines of Giannakidou & Merchant 1998) are not borne out. In contrast, a biclausal analysis along the lines of Gracanin-Yuksek (2007) accounts for the basic syntactico-semantic properties of the construction in question.
