Speaker: Keely New (MIT)
Title: On the apparent lack of multiple wh-questions in Jakarta Indonesian
Time: Tuesday, December 3, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: It has been claimed that in certain languages (e.g. Italian, Irish, and Somali), it is impossible to form questions that include more than one wh-constituent. This is surprising because under prominent semantic analyses of questions, single and multiple wh-questions are derived through similar mechanisms (as noted by Dayal, 2016 and Kotek, 2019). I argue that the lack of multiple wh-questions should not be attributed to a language parameter. Focusing on Jakarta Indonesian as a case study, I will show that (i) the impossibility of multiple wh-questions is construction-specific rather than a language-wide pattern, and (ii) we can derive the impossibility of multiple wh-questions from independently observable constraints on question formation.