On the interpretation of multiple questions

Abstract

The paper shows that crosslinguistically, overt movement of a wh-phrase to SpecCP results in the loss of the single-pair interpretation for multiple questions, i.e. it forces the pair-list interpretation. It is shown that the damaging effect of overt movement to SpecCP on the availability of single-pair answers can be accounted for with an extension of Hagstrom’s (1998) semantics of questions to languages with overt wh-movement. More precisely, the effect is argued to follow from Relativized Minimality: In questions with a single-pair interpretation, the Q morpheme, which is base-generated below C, induces a relativized minimality effect when a wh-phrase crosses it on its way to SpecCP.