A Morpho-Syntactic Analysis of Echo Questions
Seungwan Ha · 생성문법연구 · 2010
Echo questions behave differently from other interrogative types in morpho-syntatic perspectives, some of which include lack of superiority effects, no subject-auxiliary inversion, no wh-movement, and obligatory wide scope-taking. In this study, we first catalogue properties of echo questions and review a recent syntactic analysis. Sobins (2010) feature checking analysis attempts to explain non-conventional behaviors of echo questions by agreement between C and echo-introduced wh-word. However, Sobins analysis faces both conceptual and empirical problems; it cannot explain, for example, the existence of multiple echo wh-questions, lack of weak crossover effects, and no NPI licensing. To resolve the problems, in this paper, we propose an alternative, based on Den Dikkens (2003) morpho-syntactic analysis of wh-movement. All wh-words share [+wh]-feature, but a silent Q-morpheme attaches to echo-introduced wh-phrase. And the Q-morpheme marks the scope of the wh-word without an agreement with C. We argue that the alternative analysis can explain a wider range of empirical data, including those problematic cases for Sobins.