Year: 2004
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: This chapter sketches out the fine structure of the left periphery of questions as it emerges from our ongoing research on French, Bellunese, and Italian wh-questions (see Pollock et al. 1999; Poletto and Pollock 1999, 2000; Pollock 2000). The two basic principles that have guided our inquiry are simply stated. The first is standard in comparative work in generative grammar; it claims that the considerable variation in spell-out sequences exhibited by the wh-configurations across (those three) languages is not random; rather, it can be profitably (re)analyzed as reflecting the interplay of the invariant structure of the complementizer domain (in Romance) and a small number of morphologically based differences that are part of the primary linguistic data to which the language learners are necessarily exposed.
Authors: Cecilia Poletto, Jean-Yves Pollock
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W75249453