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Part of
Boundaries, Phases and Interfaces: Case studies in honor of Violeta Demonte
Edited by Olga Fernández-Soriano, Elena Castroviejo Miró and Isabel Pérez-Jiménez
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 239] 2017
► pp. 193–222

Multiple Wh-Movement in European Spanish

Exploring the role of interface conditions for variation

| Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

In this paper I explore Multiple Wh-Movement (MWM) in European Romance, a syntactic pattern that has been regarded as impossible (all Romance languages but Romanian excluding it; cf. Escandell-Vidal 1999; RAE-ASALE 2009; Chernova 2015, among others). After reviewing some data that qualify this well-known observation, I argue that European Spanish can actually display MWM under specific discourse conditions, some of which have not been previously reported. The paper puts forward an analysis of the facts adopting Richards’ (2010) Distinctiness, a PF condition that requires for X and Y to be morphologically or featurally different (within the same domain) for them to be linearized, a solution that places the relevant parameter in the Syntax → PF wing of the grammar.

Keywords: distinctness, interface conditions, label, multiple wh-movement, parametric variation, phase
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background discussion: The facts
  • 3.Licensing conditions of multiple wh-movement
    • 3.1Licensing conditions: The role of Case
    • 3.2Licensing conditions: The background
  • 4.A Distinctness-based account
    • 4.1MWM and Distinctness
    • 4.2Potential problems
  • 5.The position occupied by non-first wh-phrases in MWM
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 June 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.239.10gal
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