Why is ‘Why’ Unique? Its Syntactic and Semantic Properties
considers the behaviour of this peculiar
wh
-element across many different languages, including Ewe, Trevisan, Italian, Basque, German, Dutch, Cantonese, Mandarin, English and Hebrew. In ten original chapters, the authors explore various aspects of
why
-questions, such as the way
interacts with V2 constructions in Basque, with a subject clitic in Trevisan or how its morpho-syntactic make-up determines its merge position in Ewe, to mention but a few. Furthermore, a clear-cut distinction is established between high and low reason adverbials which are subsequently examined in
-stripping environments in Dutch.
Beyond
proper, the book explores a special class of
-expressions in some in-situ languages which give rise to unexpected
-construals with a touch of whining force. The objective is to explain the unusual syntactic position of these
-expressions as well as their association with peculiar pragmatics. The questions are addressed for Cantonese: are
what
-initial sentences genuine questions? To what extent are Cantonese
-initial sentences similar to
how
-initial sentences in Mandarin? Beside these
-as-
questions, a special class of rhetorical questions, the doubly-marked interrogatives in Hebrew, come under scrutiny.
Why is ‘why’ unique also concerns the interface with prosody and several experimental studies investigate precisely this aspect.