Under the direction of Dr. Martin Hackl, Ms. Hadas Kotek will conduct psycholinguistic experiments on the real-time processing of multiple wh-questions in English (e.g., "John asked which students could not read which sign last night"). Multiple wh-questions are a central construction in the debate regarding the existence of Covert Movement (CM) operations. The debate revolves around the question of whether CM operations are responsible for the interpretation of semantic operators at the syntactic level of Logical Form (LF), or whether alternative mechanisms must be adopted. The CM hypothesis holds that, in contexts like the example above, both "which students" and "which sign" are treated as semantic operators that take scope over [x could not read y last night] by covertly moving out of that structure despite the fact that "which sign" remains a constituent of that larger unit in the (overt) phonological form of the sentence. The results of this research project will contribute to this debate by experimentally testing the existence of CM operations in multiple wh-questions.
The project seeks to provide a detailed and theoretically informed description and analysis of the Logical Form of wh-questions. Crucial new evidence will be collected that will distinguish between two main approaches. Although these approaches differ substantially in their treatment of the syntax and semantics of interrogatives, traditional means of investigation have not been successful in choosing between these approaches. One reason for this lack of success is that off-line judgments collected from native speaker informants regarding the acceptability, felicity, and semantic content of multiple questions do not provide direct evidence about CM, and have not pinpointed the grammatical causes of CM for wh-expressions. The project proposes an experimental investigation of multiple wh-questions which goes beyond off-line judgments. In particular, it proposes to conduct three real-time sentence processing experiments to test differing predictions made by these two approaches.
The grammatical configurations that these experiments will investigate focus on so-called intervention effects, which have been central to current debates about the syntax and semantics of multiple wh-questions. This project will provide novel experimental evidence for the existence and nature of intervention effects, which have not been previously tested empirically. This award will also support the scientific training of a promising scholar.
