Joey Sabbagh Talk
Please note this event occurred in the past.
March 27, 2025 9:00 am - 10:00 am ET
ILC N400
Pseudo-Cleft analyses of Wh-Questions: A Tagalog Case Study
| While virtually all research on wh-questions in Tagalog assumes that they have a bi-clausal (pseudo-)cleft structure, this work argues against this analysis. I re-visit two of the primarily empirical arguments for the presumed pseudo-cleft structure that have been cited in the literature and argue that such arguments are weak, inconclusive, and/or contradicted by previously unobserved data. The evidence, I argue, lends support to a `conventional’ analysis of wh-questions for Tagalog in which they are derived by wh-movement. The arguments to be made center around a number of phenomenon, including: Second positions clitics, the distribution of modals, (obligatory) pied-piping, and reconstruction effects. More broadly, this work may be viewed as part of a larger claim that no language exclusively requires wh-questions to take the form of a pseudo-cleft. Though the claim to the contrary appears frequently for Austronesian languages (Tagalog, Malagasy, among others), Adger & Ramchand have also (recently) made the claim for Gaelic. |