Focus on "Wh"-Questions

This book is a minimalist study of wh-questions in Polish, which aims at providing a homogeneous account for the phenomena under consideration. The discussion is set against the hypothesis that wh-fronting in Polish targets [Spec, CP]. The analysis relies on the idea that wh-movement applies for reasons of feature checking, as assumed by Chomsky (1993, 1995 ch. 3). The book offers an analysis of multiple wh-questions, wh-scope marking constructions and long-distance wh-extraction facts in Polish. The author argues that no overt wh-movement in the traditional sense takes place in Polish. Wh-fronting is triggered by the need to check a strong [+focus]-feature. It is shown that the analysis in terms of focus movement is well suited to capture the properties of interrogative constructions in Polish.

Autorentext

The Author: Maja Lubanska is a graduate of the University of Wroclaw. Her main field of interest is generative linguistics and her primary research interest is the syntactic theory in the transformational-generative framework. Her M.A. thesis submitted to the Institute of English Studies at the University of Wroclaw in 1998 was devoted to an analysis of scrambling in Polish. In 1998 she joined the Institute of English Studies at the University of Wroclaw as a Ph.D. student. Since October 2004 she has been a faculty member of the institute, where she teaches a variety of courses on the English language.

Inhalt
Contents: Multiple wh-fronting Wh-scope marking Long-distance wh-extraction.