BS L C An empirical study on word order in interrogatives Doctoral thesis for obtaining the academic degree Doctor of Philosophy (Dr. phil.) submitted by Dold, Simon at the Faculty of Humanities Department of Linguistics Konstanz, 2018 Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System (KOPS) URL: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:352-2-3farrzq23fvs8 Date of the oral examination: May 29, 2018 First Referee: Prof. Dr. Georg A. Kaiser Second Referee: Dr. Ricardo Etxepare Third Referee: Prof. Dr. Tanja Kupisch Anowledgment First of all, I want to thank my first supervisor and Doktorvater Georg Kaiser for his continued support in this project, from the very start to its completion. I greatly appreciate your trust in me and I am very grateful that you reawakened a dormant interest in the Basque culture and language in me, and that you encouraged me to take a professional interest in it. Thank you for the freedom and flexibility you offered me in my research, writing, and teaching. I am very grateful to my second supervisor, Ricardo Etxepare. Thank you Ricardo for your support and patience guiding me through this project. It was a great opportunity to work with you in IKER in Bayonne. Every one of our conversations was filled with inspiring ideas as well as vital input. Sharing your broad theoretical knowledge in all fields of linguistics helped me find my way in this project. Thank you both! Thank you, Tanja, for agreeing to be on my committee. To my amazing colleagues, who I am very grateful to have worked with. Thank you Carmen, Katharina, and Marieke for supporting me, cheering me up, discussing my work, and always having time for a short chat or a cup of coffee. Thank you, Michael and Janina, for your support and the many fruitful discussions about different subjects concerning my work. Thank you, Niklas, for your help with the statistics, R, and the great times we shared training for our various sporting events that we needed to clear our heads from all this studying. A special thank also goes to the staff at IKER in Bayonne. Your help with the French university’s bureaucracy was invaluable. To my fellow investigators in Bayonne, especially Aritz, Maitena and Urtzi, thank you for a great year with you all in Bayonne! I want to thank the 181 participants from all over Spain who were willing to fill out my question- naires. Without their help and support, this work would not have been possible. A big thank you goes to all my friends who have been here for me throughout this entire time. I thank each and every one of you for your continued incredible support, motivation, and – when necessary – encouragement. A special thanks goes to the Bodensee underwater rugby team for sharing my passion for this great sport. To you Heike, thank you for your extraordinary help and support, which even included airmail care and motivation packages! Thank you for your company, your great hospitality, and simply for being an amazing friend. I wish you the very best for your new beginnings. My greatest thanks goes to my family and my wonderful wife-to-be Shanti. Thank you my dear parents, sisters (-in-law), and brothers (-in-law)! You were always there for me, and your interest in what I was doing helped keep me going through the difficult times. I am so grateful for your support and help that, in so many different ways, allows me to go on. Shanti, thank you so much for believing in me‼ Without your constant love and support, this work would have never been completed. Quite literally, as I owe the readability of this work to your proofreading. Thank you for being such an amazing and wonderful woman! Abstract Basque and Spanish are two typological very different languages. Nevertheless, they show surprisingly similar word order restrictions in wh-interrogatives. Both languages exhibit obligatory wh-fronting in an unmarked wh-interrogative and they usually require wh-phrase-verb adjacency, which can only be interrupted by clitics or some select adverbs. The two languages differ, however, regard to two types of interrogatives: complex and multiple wh-questions. In this work, I will mainly discuss the first type. In Spanish, complex wh-sentences allow an intervening constituent between the wh-phrase and the verb, interrupting the otherwise obligatory adjacency. It seems that Spanish offers the possibility of analyzing these complex wh-phrases as clitic-left dislocations. In Basque, this is never possible, because the wh-phrase-verb adjacency has to be retained, no matter the complexity of the wh-phrase. In this thesis, I examine differences between monolingual Spanish and bilingual Basque-Spanish speakers regarding the acceptability of Spanish complex wh-questions without wh-phrase-verb adja- cency. In two studies conducted in 2016, I observed that bilingual speakers accept such wh-questions with an intervening constituent much less than monolinguals. I propose that this difference has two main sources: a different underlying structure in wh-questions in the two languages despite the su- perficial resemblance and a general preference for common structures, as well as with a lack of input during bilingual language acquisition. I elaborate a theoretical model based on Cable’s (2010) Q(uestion)-particle (QP) and QP-movement approach. In this approach, the variation in question formation is explained by a different core param- eter setting of the Q-particle, namely that Spanish isa Q-projection language and Basque a Q-adjunction language. According to Cable (2010), wh-fronting is not the result of a special relationship between the wh-phrase and a higher C-head, but of one between the Q-particle and a C-head. The wh-phrase only appears sentence initial because it is ‘dragged’ along by this Q-particle, which takes the phrase contain- ing the wh-word as a complement. This is the case in Spanish. Basque differs from Spanish in thatthe Q-particle does not take the phrase containing the wh-word as a complement, but is only adjoined to it. This allows the Q-particle-to move to the C-head alone, without taking thewhole wh-phrase with it. The reason that Basque nevertheless exhibit wh-fronting lies in an independent property: a preverbal focus feature that has to be satisfy by an adequate phrase. In a positive wh-question, the wh-phrase normally suffices for the job and therefore moves to the preverbal position. An important observation in a bilingual language contact situation is the following: if one language has possibilities A and B to analyze a certain structure and a second language only allows option A, bilingual speakers tend to primarily use option A in both languages, especially during acquisition. Applied to the case at hand, option A would be the analysis of complex wh-phrases with wh-phrase- verb adjacency and option B the alternative analysis as clitic-left dislocations. In Spanish, both options are available, in Basque only the first. Therefore, the child that acquires Basque and Spanish intrinsically prefers the option with adjacency and, in addition, the surrounding adults probably do too. This means, the child simply does not hear enough positive evidence to establish the exception rule for the complex wh-phrases, in contrast to monolingual children, who do receive enough evidence. The study presented in this work is another example that an intense language contact caninfluence the involved languages on a level deeper than just the lexical. It shows that syntactic structures can be affected, even in typological very distinct languages like Basque and Spanish. Zusammenfassung Spanisch und Baskisch sind aus typologischer Sicht sehr unterschiedliche Sprachen. Sie zeigen jedoch überraschend ähnliche Einschränkungen bezüglich der Wortstellung in wh-Fragen. Beide Sprachen sind obligatorische ex-situ Sprachen und verlangen in der unmarkierten wh-Frage normalerweise die direkte Adjazenz zwischen der wh-Phrase und dem Verb, die nur von Klitika und einigen wenigen Adverbien unterbrochen werden kann. Die Sprachen unterscheiden sich jedoch in komplexen wh- und multiplen wh-Fragen. Ich werde mich in der vorliegenden Arbeit hauptsächlich mit Ersteren befassen. Spanische komplexe wh-Fragen erlauben, dass eine Konstituente zwischen der wh-Phrase und dem Verb steht und damit die ansonsten obligatorische Adjazenz unterbricht. Anscheinend ist es im Spanischen möglich komplexe wh-Phrasen wie klitische Linksdislokationen zu analysieren. Im Baskischen ist eine solche Analyse hingegen nicht möglich, unabhängig der Komplexität der wh-Phrase. Die Adjazenz zwischen der wh-Phrase und dem Verb muss immer gewahrt bleiben. In der vorliegenden Arbeit untersuche ich Akzeptabilitätsunterschiede bei monolingualen Spre- cher*innen des Spanischen und bilingualen Sprecher*innen des Spanischen und Baskischen bezüglich komplexer wh-Fragen ohne Adjazenz zwischen wh-Phrase und Verb. In zwei von mir 2016 durchge- ührten Studien habe ich beobachtet, dass bilinguale Sprecher*innen diese Art von Fragen mit einer deutlich niedrigeren Akzeptabilität bewerteten als monolinguale Sprecher*innen. Folgende Faktoren sind hierür verantwortlich: Erstens liegen den wh-Fragen im Spanischen und Baskischen – trotz gro- ßer oberflächlicher Ähnlichkeit – unterschiedliche Strukturen zugrunde. Zweitens ist eine allgemeine Tendenz bilingualer Sprecher zu beobachten, Konstruktionen zu verwenden, die in beiden Sprachen möglich sind. Das in dieser Arbeit entwickelte theoretische Modell basiert auf Cables (2010) Q(question)-Par- tikel (Fragepartikel, QP) und QP-Bewegung. Dieses Modell bestimmt die verschiedenen Typen von wh-Fragen, indem es die Beziehung zwischen der Q-Partikel und der XP, die die wh-phrase enthält, vergleicht. Nach Cables Theorie muss Spanisch als Q-projection language (Q-Projektionssprache) und Baskisch als Q-adjunction language (Q-Adjunktionsprache) bewertet werden. Des Weiteren ist wh-Be- wegung nicht das Resultat einer Beziehung zwischen dem wh-Wort und einem linksperipheren C-Kopf, sondern der Q-Partikel mit einem solchen.