Even Wh-doublets Don't Move in a Language Without Wh-movement

Abstract

In this paper, I have examined an array of understudied Wh-doubling constructions in Tagalog, a Wh-fronting language, and in Korean, a typical Wh-in-situ language. Cross-linguistic considerations show that “reduplication” or “double”occurrences of Wh-words in Whinterrogatives, whether it is exact or non-exact, word-level (X 0 ) or a phrase level (XP), seem quite ubiquitous in natural languages. This might be robust evidence for successive cyclic Wh-movement (Radford 2004) or for a movement theory of Copy-and-Deletion (Hornstein, Nunes, Grohmann 2005). Hong (2014), Deppe & Hong (2014), and Hong & Deppe (2016) have reported a novel set of Korean/Tagalog data that shows that Korean displays doubled Wh-words in Wh-interrogatives, and that Tagalog shows Wh-doublets in Spec-CP. Interestingly, Chung (1999) has argued that the plural (or list) reading of Korean Wh-doublets comes from the morphological structure of the word, [X 0 [X0Whl]+[X 0 Wh2]] having the two root words, as a co-compound. Departing from Chung"s analysis, I propose that the internal structure of Wh-doubling construction is derived via Head movement of X 0 to Contrastive Reduplication Projection (CRP), originally suggested in Ghomesh, Jackendoff, Rosen, and Russell (2004) for English Contrastive Focus Reduplication. Thus, the Wh-doublet in Wh-in-situ language such as Korean stays in its thematic position and Wh-fronting language with Wh-doublets, Tagalog, allows Wh-movement of Wh-doublets, which is triggered by the strong Number feature in C. The ramification of this analysis is that Reduplication phenomenon, Wh or non-Wh, can be accounted for as Copy theory of Movement.