We are delighted to announce the publication of our colleague Elise Newman’s paper, “On Projection and the Shadow of [Wh]”, in Linguistic Inquiry. Congratulations, Elise!
Here is the abstract:
Much work has shown that wh-movement is subject to several kinds of locality restrictions cross-linguistically. I propose that these restrictions arise when [wh] projects past the maximal projection that it came from. When this happens, it intervenes for wh-movement, trapping the wh-element in its base position, unless it can escape through other means. The need to escape the domain of [wh] is proposed to capture the distribution of successive-cyclic movement and interactions with Voice in different languages. Different locality conditions in different languages are captured by different distributions of the same features and probes.
The paper is open access: https://doi.org/10.1162/LING.a.564