Syntax II						Spring 2012
Problem 7: WH Questions					Due Friday 4/27

Example set I:

(1)  Who has been eating my porridge?
(2)  What stopped you from bringing the gorilla in?
(3)  Which students have been accused of not finishing their homework?
(4)  Which students have read which books?
(5)  Whose car ran over my dog?
(6)  Who shot who?

Example set II:

(7)  I wonder who has been eating my porridge.
(8)  We all know what stopped you from bringing the gorilla in.
(9)  It is irrelevant which students have finished their homework.
(10)  Which students have finished their homework is irrelevant.
(11)  They won't tell me whose car ran over my dog.

Example set III:

(12)  I wonder what the dwarves were saying.
(13)  We would like to know which boxes the monkeys put the bananas in.
(14)  We couldn't figure out what the monkeys were putting in the boxes.
(15)  Whose car my dog was run over by is a mystery to me.
(16)  It doesn't matter where the monkeys put the bananas.

Study all these examples.  The first task of this assignment is to decide
what needs to be said in the grammar of English to get them all generated.

Start with set I.  Discuss anything new, and particularly discuss the
categories of the wh-pronouns that appear in these examples.
Show derivations for a couple of them.

For set II, state explicitly any new thing that needs to be said about
subcategorization.  What is the category of "whose car ran over my dog"
in (11)?  Show the derivation of (11).

Set III will require a movement transformation.  State it explicitly,
even if we have already formulated it in class, saying exactly what moves
and where it moves to.  Give several arguments that these sentences do indeed
require a transformation, rather than just being base generated as they are.
 Show the derivation of (15).

Example set IV

(17)  What have the dwarves been saying?
(18)  Whose car will the princess be riding in?
(19)  Which candidate do you expect to win the election?
(20)  Which boxes do the monkeys seem to be about to put the bananas in?
(21)  How far can your dog's fleas swim?
(22)  Who was the money stolen by?
(23)  How silly can a person get?

How do the examples in set IV differ from the ones above?
Where does the moved thing move from?  Where does the moved thing move to?

Give derivations for (19) and (20).

Make sure everything you propose is in accord with X-bar theory and the
theory of movement developed in class.