• Hans-Martin Gärtner & Jens Michaelis. In Defense of Generalized  Wh-Clustering. Paper presented at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 46), Chicago, IL, April 8-10, 2010. A revised version appeared in: R. Baglini, T. Grinsell, J. Keane, A.R. Singerman and J. Thomas (eds.), CLS 46-1, Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society: The Main Session, pp. 137-146, The Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago, IL, 2014.

Abstract

In earlier work (Gärtner and Michaelis 2010), we argued that the treatment of multiple-wh-interrogatives within Stablerian Minimalist Grammars should be developed in terms of wh-clustering (Grewendorf 2001, Sabel 2001). This argument rests on the assumption that application of wh-clustering should be generalized to all languages. Here we defend that assumption against proposals by Grewendorf (2001) and Sabel (2001) to restrict wh-clustering to languages showing a particular morpholexical affinity in their inventories of interrogative and (pure) indefinite pronouns (Bhat 2000, Cheng 1991, Haspelmath 1997). Our defense of generalized wh-clustering focuses on showing that the locality-theoretic reasons given by Grewendorf (2001) to distinguish clustering languages from non-clustering languages lack systematicity. In particular, there seems to be no clear correlation between the morpholexical precondition for wh-clustering and the behavior with respect to superiority and additional wh-effects.

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