We examine the syntactic behavior of wh-arguments and wh-adjuncts in Persian, a wh-in-situ language that exhibits (seemingly) optional wh-movement. We show that the two types of wh-phrases have distinct internal structures that are responsible for their different syntactic behavior. The analysis indicates that wh-movement has an effect on the semantic output of the derivation, and thus wh-scrambling is not a semantically vacuous operation. We finally show that the wh-feature must be in a local Agree relation with a wh-operator in Spec/CP to allow scope marking and sentence typing. This last claim predicts that an intervening polarity item would block the Agree relation, a prediction that is borne out empirically.
2017.
Partial
Wh‐
Movement
. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Second Edition, ► pp. 1 ff.
Karimi, Simin
2008. Scrambling. Language and Linguistics Compass 2:6 ► pp. 1271 ff.
Shiamizadeh, Zohreh, Johanneke Caspers & Niels O. Schiller
2017. The Role of Prosody in the Identification of Persian Sentence Types: Declarative or Wh-question?. Linguistics Vanguard 3:1
Shiamizadeh, Zohreh, Johanneke Caspers & Niels O. Schiller
2018. When is a wh-in-situ question identified in standard Persian?. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 33:9 ► pp. 1168 ff.
Shiamizadeh, Zohreh, Johanneke Caspers & Niels O. Schiller
2019. Do Persian Native Speakers Prosodically Mark Wh-in-situ Questions?. Language and Speech 62:2 ► pp. 229 ff.
Solaimani, Ehsan, Florence Myles & Laurel Lawyer
2023. Testing the Interpretability Hypothesis: Evidence from acceptability judgments of relative clauses by Persian and French learners of L2 English. Second Language Research► pp. 026765832311627 ff.
Taleghani, Azita H.
2009. Persian Linguistics in the Twentieth Century. Iranian Studies 42:2 ► pp. 275 ff.
TOOSARVANDANI, MAZIAR
2008. Wh-movement and the syntax of sluicing. Journal of Linguistics 44:3 ► pp. 677 ff.
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