The University of Iowa
Department of Linguistics Colloquium Series
Fall 2015
The whats and whens of grammatical relations
Brooke Larson
Visiting Assistant Professor in Linguistics
Thursday, September 17, 2015
4:00pm
203 BCSB
This talk concerns a problematic paradigm in English and other languages that I will call
coordinated wh questions (CWh for short). An example of an acceptable CWh is given in (1)
below.
(1) What and when did Jane eat?
These sentences are odd in that the superficially seem to involve the coordination of an
argument wh-word and an adjunct wh-word. Or, failing that, it appears there is overt
movement of multiple wh-words within a single English sentence: an apparent anomaly. In this
talk I argue that not only are neither of the above analyses correct, but also that any other
syntactico-centric analysis of the construction fails.
The example in (1) will be shown to contrast with examples like those in (2) where
the relevant verb is of fixed transitivity (cf the ambitransitive 'eat' above). Further, the
particular order of the argument versus the adjunct will be shown to effect acceptability as
well. This is shown in (3a-b) where the order of the wh-words is the opposite and both
sentences are acceptable (as will be supported by a judgment study)
(2) *What and when did Jane fix?
(3) a. When and what did Jane eat?
b. When and what did Jane fix?
I then posit that the two wh-words bear two different types of dependency between their
overt position and their lower position. The difference between these two dependencies is
evinced through an online psycholinguistic measure that shows a lack of so-called filled gap
effects for the first wh-word (what).
Please join us for refreshments before the talk at 3:15 pm in 571 EPB.