The Diverse Nature of Noninterrogative Wh

1 Introduction

In recent years, head-raising/promotion analyses of English restrictive relative clauses (RRCs), whereby the head is moved directly from within the RRC, have gained popularity, in part because they offer a treatment of relativization that dispenses with mechanisms like predication and identification conditions on null operators. This type of analysis was originally proposed by Schachter (1973) and Vergnaud (1974), revived by Kayne (1994), and refined by Bianchi (2000) to answer a number of objections to Kayne's proposal raised by Borsley (1997). However, on the basis of empirical evidence pertaining to reconstruction possibilities, Aoun and Li (2003) have argued that in English, head raising is available only for non-wh-RRCs with type I determiners and that all other RRCs—that is, wh-RRCs and non-wh RRCs with type II determiners—involve an external base-generated head that enters into a predication/agreement relation with a moved wh-operator originating within the RRC (see Chomsky 1977).¹

In this squib, the following two claims made by Aoun and Li (2003) with respect to RRCs will be examined in relation to other noninterrogative wh-constructions: (a) in English, a moved noninter-rogative wh-phrase semantically combines quantification and restriction (Aoun and Li 2003:212); (b) in RRCs, the use of a wh-phrase indicates that the structure is derived by movement of a wh-operator that is in a predication/agreement relation with a base-generated head (Aoun and Li 2003:115-116). We will argue, on the basis of data pertaining to English nonrestrictive relative clauses (NRRCs), that movement of a noninterrogative wh-phrase does not always signal a predication relation, nor does it entail that the wh-element is quantification. We will further claim, given evidence from clefting phenomena in English, that a wh-phrase may occur in a structure derived via promotion provided that it is the optional spell-out of the wh-feature that attracts the "promoted phrase" to Spec,CP.

2 Aoun and Li's (2003) Account of Restrictive Relative Clauses

Aoun and Li's (2003) claim that both head-raising/promotion and head base-generation/operator movement strategies are available to derive RRCs rests primarily on the observation that some RRCs exhibit the full range of reconstruction effects while others do not. For example, there is a systematic contrast between wh-RRCs and non-wh-RRCs with respect to the reconstruction of V + O idioms (1a), anaphoric binding (1b), pronouns interpreted as bound variables (1c), and quantifier scope (2).

(1)

1. a. The careful track (that)/??which she's keeping of her expenses pleases me.

2. b. We admired the picture of himself_i (that)/*which John_i likes best.

3. c. The picture of his_i mother (that)/?*which every student_i painted in art class was impressive.

(2)

1. a. I phoned the two patients (that) every doctor will examine.

   (wide scope reading for ∀ possible)

2. b. I phoned the two patients who every doctor will examine.

   (wide scope reading for ∀ unavailable)

Aoun and Li point out that the head-raising analysis easily explains reconstruction effects in non-wh-RRCs and propose that they partake in the structure in (3). They also take the lack of reconstruction effects in wh-RRCs to indicate that the head in such constructions is base-generated in its surface position and that the wh-operator they contain undergoes movement in the fashion illustrated in (4).

(3)

(4)

Besides having the obvious advantage of accounting for the lack of reconstruction effects in wh-RRCs, the structure in (4) does not base-generate phrases such as [who(m) NP] and [why NP], which are never found in other contexts. Having to base-generate such phrases was one of the disadvantages of Kayne's (1994) promotion analysis of wh- RRCs, illustrated in (5).

(5)

1. a. the person with whom I played tennis . . .

2. b. the [C⁰ [I played tennis with whom person]]

3. c. the [with whom person [C⁰ [I played tennis [e]]]]

4. d. the [^CP[^PP person_i [with whom [e]_i]] [C⁰ . . .

3 Nonrestrictive Relative Clauses

Unlike...