multiple WH

[David Gil]

Dear all,

I would appreciate any responses to the following multiple questions on
multiple WH:

QUESTION 1:

In English there are "multiple WH" questions such as the following:

(1) Who hit who?

In such questions, two WH words cooccur within a single sentence and
constitute a single act of questioning.  Generally, such questions call
for a "list" answer, eg. "John hit Joe, Bob hit Bill, and Tim hit
Terry".  Such constructions have been the topic of much discussion in
the generative literature.

My question:  Are there any languages which do NOT allow multiple WH
questions?

QUESTION 2:

In English multiple WH questions are ungrammatical (other than with an
echo interpretation) if both WH words are conjoined, for example:

(2) *Who and who came?

My two related questions:

(a) Are there any languages in which such multiply-conjoined WH
questions are grammatical?
(b) Has there been any discussion in the literature of
multiply-conjoined WH questions, and of their ungrammaticality in
English?  (Note:  To the best of my knowledge, the literature inspired
by Ross' constraints accounts for the ungrammaticality of questions such
as *Who and John came, but does not specifically deal with
multiply-conjoined WH questions; and as is well known, the distribution
of WH words in multiple WH questions is different from that in ordinary
questions.)

Thanks,

David
--
David Gil

Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Inselstrasse 22, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany

Telephone: 49-341-9952321
Fax: 49-341-9952119
Email: gil at eva.mpg.de
Webpage:  http://monolith.eva.mpg.de/~gil/