A Syntactic Approach to Intervention Effects between Interrogative C and Wh-in-situ

초록

An intervening effect occurs whenever a focus-bearing element intervenes between an interrogative C and wh-in-situ. There arises cancellation of intervention effects, when the focus-bearing elements carry discourse effects such as a presupposed interpretation or specificity, which is syntactically explained in this paper. When the elements with focal prominence in question undergo from the preverbal position to the sentence-initial position (viz. spec-C, here), they come to carry the discourse effect such as a presupposed interpretation or contrastiveness. That is, the scrambled argument to the sentence-initial position cannot bear any focus between C and wh-in-situ. When the focus-bearing element in the subject position comes to bear a specific interpretation pragmatically, it is reanalyzed to spec-C. which induces it not to bear focus. At this point, the probe [iQ, iF] in C and the goal [uQ, uF] in wh-phrase are in an Agree relation; hence, the sentence is acceptable. Under my system, the wh-phrases have uninterpretable features [uQ, uF], which needs to be checked against the interpretable features of a matching operator. Only the interrogative C has the complete set of interpretable features [iQ, iF] of the wh-in-situ and so only it can Agree with the wh-in-situ, eliminating all of the uninterpretable features. However, when the intervening focus operator with the interpretable focus feature [iF] which comes with the focused element, appears between C and wh-in-situ, the intervention effect arises. At this point, the closest c-commanding Foc cannot match on every feature with wh-in-situ, since it does not have the feature [iQ]. Hence, the probe [iQ, iF] in C and the goal [uQ, uF] in wh-phrase cannot be in an Agree relation. In an echo question, a focus-bearing element preceding wh-in-situ cannot be a focus, since the hearer is likely to reanalyze the NP-man as discourse-old (viz. presupposed). When the focus-bearing element is reinterpreted as presupposed or specific in spec-C, the intervention effects are cancelled.

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