Strategies of wh-coordination

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the cross-linguistically available strategies used in the formation of questions with coordinated wh-expressions. It offers a systematic characterization of the existing surface patterns of wh-coordination and the syntactic strategies underlying these, and presents typological generalizations on the distribution of these strategies, based on a cross-linguistic survey involving 12 languages. It will be pointed out that languages can be classified into four types according to the availability of coordinated wh-questions in them and that these four types can make use of at least six distinct syntactic strategies for the derivation of wh-coordination. The availability of these strategies will be shown to be limited by the syntactic typology of wh-questions.

Coordination of Unlike Grammatical Functions

“…Bulgarian, Croatian, Polish and Russian) and in some neighbouring languages (Romanian, Hungarian, West Armenian), as well as -though significantly constrained -in English, French, German, Dutch, Italian and Spanish (Paperno, 2012, Lipták, 2012, Bîlbîie and Gazdik, 2012. In the case of these Germanic and Romance languages, the phenomenon seems to be limited to the coordination of optional wh-items (Gračanin-Yüksek, 2007, Lipták, 2012) -e.g., an adjunct and an optional argument -and often occurs in titles, as in (3) above. In the case of the "Slavic sprachbund", the phenomenon is much more robust.…”