Séminaire Linguistique Informatique




1 Mars 2010

Jens Michaelis (Universität Bielefeld - Fakultät für Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft).

TITRE:  A Mildly Context-Sensitive Treatment of Multiple-Wh -Interrogatives

Stablerian Minimalist Grammars (MGs) (Stabler 1997) are mildly context-
sensitive in the sense of Joshi (1985), because they impose a locality condition
called shortest move condition (SMC). The SMC so construed faces the
obvious challenge of multiple-wh -questions. We will show how introducing the
structure building operation cluster allows an SMC-compatible MG-treatment
of this domain of syntax in different languages. Adopting the MG-formalism,
this can consequently be taken as a motivation for applying the tool of
clustering to multiple-wh -interrogatives throughout, i.e., generalizing the
wh -cluster analysis of multiple-wh -questions proposed by Grewendorf (2001)
and Sabel (2001) for particular languages like, e.g., Bulgarian, German or
Japanese.