CP, question features, and clause type

All human languages distinguish between declarative, imperative, and interrogative sentences. That is, all languages have questions. But what, if anything, distinguishes questions syntactically? How are they formally different from, say, assertions?

What is it that causes an utterance to be interpreted as a question? I will try to address these questions in the following.

The CP is where so-called clause typing takes place. I will adopt the clausal typing hypothesis (CTH) of Cheng (1991), according to which every clause must be “typed” as either declarative, interrogative, etc. The CTH is stated as follows:

(7) The clausal typing hypothesis (Cheng 1991, p. 29)

Every clause needs to be typed. In the case of typing a wh-question, either awh-particle in C⁰ is used or else fronting of a wh-word to the Spec of C⁰ is used, thereby typing a clause through C⁰ by Spec-head agreement.

Cheng (1991, chapter 2) argues that in languages that have question particles (including both yes/no- and wh-particles), clauses are typed by these particles.

She further proposes that so-called in-situ languages (i.e. languages without overt wh-movement) have wh-particles, and that languages with such typing particles necessarily have wh-words in-situ. Importantly, typing particles are taken to be located in C⁰. In languages that lack these question particles, however, clauses are typed by overt wh-movement to Spec-CP and through Spec-head agreement between C⁰ and its specifier.

Following Chomsky (2000, p. 128), I will take C⁰ in interrogative clauses to contain an uninterpretable question feature [uQ]. By the principle of Full Interpretation, this feature must be deleted by the end of the derivation for the derivation to converge. In a wh-question, [uQ] on C⁰ triggers raising of the wh-phrase, which contains a matching, interpretable question feature [iQ], from the Spec or Comp of VP (where it was first merged, if it is awh-object) to Spec-CP, leaving an unpronounced copy (indicated by strikethrough) in its initial position.¹

1The question feature [Q] is often called awh-feature [Wh]. I believe that this is—at least as long as we are not operating with more than one type of feature involved in clause typing and wh-movement—only a matter of choice of notation, and will use [Q] througout, in bothwh- and yes/no-questions. Chomsky (1995, p. 289ff) refers to the feature carried bywh-elements as FQ.

Syntactic theory and V2 13 When [iQ] enters Spec-CP, [uQ] on C⁰ is deleted by Spec-head agreement (i.e. the wh-phrase bearing [iQ] moves into a local configuration with C⁰—the checking domain of C⁰ in Chomsky’s 1995 terms—in which feature checking/deletion can take place). This process is shown in (8).²

(8) CP

C⁰

TP T⁰

VP V⁰

wh-word V⁰

T⁰ C⁰

[uQ]

QP wh-word[iQ]

In a standard yes/no-question like (9) below, in which there is no overt movement to Spec-CP, [uQ] on C is believed to be deleted by merger of a phonologically null

2I will follow Cable (2010) with respect to the labeling of the phrase containg thewh-word, and, for the sake of simplicity, simply label it QP in all tree structures, irrespective of whether it contains awh-adverb,wh-pronoun, etc. Cable suggests the following internal structure of the QP (with the Q-element being phonologically null in Norwegian):

(i) QP

Q XP

...wh-word...

This line of reasoning appears similar to the idea of separatingwh-movement from clause typing, i.e. that thewh-worditself is not responsible for clause typing, as suggested by Aboh and Pfau (2010) and Aboh (2010). A related idea is found in Cheng and Rooryck (2000), in which it is argued that an “intonation morpheme” can check [uQ] on C, and thus leave thewh-phrase in situ.

14 Chapter 2

question operator in Spec-CP (following, e.g., Adger 2003; Platzack 1998; Radford 2004).

(9) Hører hear

du you

tjelden?

oystercatcher-def

‘Do you hear the oystercatcher?’

The idea of an abstract, silent Q element occupying the sentence-initial position in yes/no-questions goes back at least to Katz and Postal (1964) and Baker (1970), who suggest that, in present-day English, this element is spelled out as whether in embedded contexts. Note that from this approach, it follows that verb movement to C⁰ has nothing to do with deleting the question feature on C. That is, verb movement is not involved in clause typing.³ The derivation leading to the deletion of [uQ] on C in (9) then looks like (10) (in which all features except [Q] are suppressed).

(10) CP

C⁰

TP T⁰

VP V⁰

DP tjelden V⁰

hører DP

du T⁰ hører DP

du C⁰[uQ]

hører Op[iQ]

Ø

Rizzi (1997) suggests that the CP be split into a series of projections functional heads, each related to different information-structurally properties. He proposes the following articulated CP:

3This seems to be in line with Chomsky (1995), who in a footnote points out that “it is not the raising of I that satisfies the strong feature of Q; rather, that has some different origin here, possibly within the phonological component” (p. 386, n.64). Chomsky’s “I” translates to T, and

“the strong feature of Q” to [uQ] on C, in my account.

Syntactic theory and V2 15 (11) CP = [ForceP [TopicP [FocusP [TopicP [FinitenessP]]]]] (Rizzi 1997)

This split-CP model is a part of what is known as cartography, an approach to syntactic structure that sets out to draw a detailed “map” of different clausal domains. The cartographic approach has been fruitful and led to a series of works on different portions of the clause in many languages (see, e.g., the collections in Rizzi 2004 and Benincà and Munaro 2010 for the left periphery of the clause). In addition to the phrases shown in (11) above, Rizzi (2001) argues for a separate InterrogativeP hosting interrogative complementizers. Holmberg (2003) argues for a PolarityP present in polar questions, and Westergaard (2009) goes on to further split the ForceP into five different projections, each representing illocutionary force, i.e. different clause types: Decl(arative)P, Int(errogative)P, Pol(arity)P, Excl(amative)P, and Imp(erative)P. All in all, the projections are many, but a general agreement as to their existence and internal order—which is claimed to be fixed—seems hard to find. (See Craenenbroeck 2009 for a collection of works discussing problems with the cartographic framework.)

Thus, in the interest of keeping my analysis as minimal as possible, and in order not to get lost in the left periphery, I will refrain from applying a split-CP, and simply adhere to the traditional, unsplit CP, as shown in (6) above. This does not mean that I reject the cartographic approach to syntactic structure, but for the present purposes, also the simplest form of the CP will suffice.