True wh-movement and wh-in situ in one language: Evidence from Colloquial Singapore English
Rachel Tan, Zheng Shen
July 2024 

Optionality between wh-movement and wh-in situ is observed in many languages, however, upon closer inspection, a stream of previous literature argue that only one strategy is truly available in any given language (Cheng 1991, Chang 2016, Faure and Palasis 2021). Bobaljik and Wurmbrand (2015) explicitly propose that a language can either have the true wh-in-situ or the wh-movement strategy, but not both. This paper uses Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) as a case study and argues that it allows true wh-movement and true wh-in situ questions. CSE has been argued to only allow wh-movement by some (Chang 2016) and to only allow wh-in-situ by others (Lan 2016). This study experimentally tests the predictions made by these analyses and show that the patterns are best accounted for if both ‘true’ wh-movement and ‘true’ wh-in-situ questions exist in CSE, thus challenging the previous analyses for CSE, and the cross-linguistic generalization in Bobaljik and Wurmbrand 2015 (see also Sato and Ngui 2017).

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007749 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	accepted by Journal of Linguistics
keywords:	experimental syntax, wh-movement, wh-in situ, colloquial singapore english, wh-optionality, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [November 2023]
Downloaded:	675 times

 

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