multiple wh-questions

[Assibi Amidu]

Dear Edith,

Your doctoral student might be interested in the following work I  
published in 2006.

Amidu, A. A. 2006. Pronouns and Pronominalizations in Kiswahili  
Grammar. (Grammatical Analyses of African Languages 27) Cologne  
(Köln): Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. Chapter 5 where I refer to multiple WH- 
elements and their combinations in Kiswahili might be of interest .  
If your student could read the entire work, that would be fine.

The book is available from the publisher who can be reached at:

Internet:  www.koeppe.de
email:  info at koeppe.de

Assibi
____________________________________________
Assibi A. Amidu
Professor of Swahili
Department of language and communication studies,
Norwegian University of Science and Technology - NTNU
N-7491 Trondheim, Norway.
____________________________________________
Den 15. mar. 2008 kl. 18.03 skrev Edith Moravcsik:

> A doctoral student here at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is  
> carrying out a crosslinguistic survey of multiple wh-questions. So  
> far we have not found much published material on the topic. If you  
> are able to provide either data or literature references, this  
> would be much appreciated.
>
> The following are the basic research questions.
>
> 1/ SELECTION OF MULTIPLE WH-WORDS
>    What wh-words can cooccur in a question? There are clearly some  
> constraints here; for example, in English, (some) wh-words that are  
> verb complements can cooccur but adjuncts resist the pattern;  
> compare "Who read what?" but "*Who read the book why?"
>
> 2/ THE LINEAR ORDER OF MULTIPLE WH-WORDS RELATIVE TO THE REST OF  
> THE SENTENCE
>     Are multiple wh-words "in situ" or do they occupy some other  
> position?
>
> 3/ THE LINEAR ORDER OF MULTIPLE WH-WORDS RELATIVE TO EACH OTHER
>    Do multiple wh-words that are not "in situ" have a preferred or  
> required order relative to each other?
>
> 4/ DO MULTIPLE WH-QUESTIONS ALWAYS HAVE A DISTRIBUTIVE INTERPRETATION?
>    For example, English "Who read what?" assumes more than one  
> subject and more than one things to read and asks about the  
> distribution of the reading materials over the set of subjects.
>
> 5/ WHAT DOES IT DEPEND ON WHETHER A LANGUAGE DOES OR DOES NOT HAVE  
> MULTIPLE WH-QUESTIONS?
>    This is a question about typological implications linking  
> mutliple wh-questions to other properties of languages.
>
> Thank you.
>
> Edith A. Moravcsik
> Professor of Linguistics
> Department of Foreign
>      Languages and Linguistics
> University of Wisconsin-
>      Milwaukee
> Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413
> E-mail: edith at uwm.edu
> Tel: (414) 229-3068
> Fax: (414) 229-2741

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