Wh-in-situ interrogatives in Spanish

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to provide a unified account of the behavior of wh-in-situ questions in Spanish (i.e., non-neutral word order and the Sentence Final Requirement). The analysis presented argues that phonological properties govern the distribution of in-situ wh-phrases. More precisely, in-situ whphrases in Spanish need to appear last within their intonational phrase. Following insights from Stjepanović (1999, 2003) on the interaction between stress assignment (Zubizarreta 1998) and the Copy Theory of movement (Chomsky 1993), I argue that in-situ wh-phrases need to appear in final position to receive main stress via the Nuclear Stress Rule. I show that in-situ wh-phrases are spell-outs of lower copies. This analysis captures the behavior of all in-situ wh-phrases in Spanish.

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