Wh-fronting is not (necessarily) wh-movement

September 16, 2011

In this talk I examine two strategies of posing a matrix wh-question in Avar, restricting my attention to situations where focus marking brings with it a change in the morphosyntactic appearance of the verb. I argue against the popular wh-extraction approach, and analyse the two strategies as involving clefting.

Superseded by chapter 4 of my PhD thesis.

Keywords: syntax, semantics, wh-questions, Avar

This is a talk at the final workshop of the Irish Network in Formal Linguistics held at Dublin City University](http://dcu.ie/).

about

I’m Pavel Rudnev, and this is my personal website. I’m a research fellow and lecturer in linguistics at HSE University in Moscow. My main area of interest is syntax and its interfaces with sound and meaning. In particular, my current research revolves around the structure of nominal expressions, agreement, case and verbal morphosyntax in East Caucasian languages, and the syntax-to-phonology mapping in Russian Sign Language.

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