THE STATUS OF WH-EXPLETIVES AND THE PARTIAL WH-MOVEMENT CONSTRUCTION OF HUNGARIAN

This paper explores the cross-linguistic status of the so-called Wh-sc ope-marker strategy of wide scope assignment through the study of its instantiation in Hungarian, assessing the role and distribution of the expletive-like Wh-element (what). After establishing the existence of the construction in Hungarian via novel types of arguments, a variety of evidence is presented showing the inadequacy of the leading analys is of Wh-expletive constructions with overt partial Wh-movement: propo sals based on the formation of a Wh-chain linking the scope-marking Wh -expletive in the higher Spec with the partially moved contentful Wh-p hrase, in a way that mimics overt full Wh-movement chains (originating in McDaniel's (1989) work on German and Romani, assumed subsequently, with some modifications, e.g. by Rizzi (1992), Brody (1993), McDaniel , Chiu and Maxfield (1995) and Muller (1995)): I motivate an alternati ve account, falling within the general framework of an indirect Wh-dep endency approach proposed by Dayal (e.g. 1994, based on the in-situ Wh of Hindi). I argue that the scope-marker of Hungarian is not an A-bar expletive, but an expletive element generated in an A-position which has a CP as its associate, and which undergoes (overt) movement to an A-bar position due to being a Wh-morpheme. The construction is shown t o arise as a by-product of independently motivated processes: (a) Wh-f eature percolation from Spec, as in (clausal) pied-piping cases, and ( b) an expletive-CP association, argued to be due to needs inherent to clausal complementation in the language and independent of any Wh-feat ure or scope-assignment. In spite of the shared indirect Wh-dependency concept and the assumption of CP being the 'associate', Dayal's parti cular analysis (1994) is shown to be empirically distinct from mine, a nd to be untenable for Hungarian, as well as for German. An initial th ree-way comparison of Hungarian vs. Hindi vs. German suggests that (at least) the syntactic implementation of the Wh-expletive strategy is d ifferent in each of the three languages. So contrary to earlier concep tions, this phenomenon does not arise from some unitary parametric sou rce, such as the availability of a Wh-expletive morpheme; rather it se ems to be parasitic on independent syntactic properties exhibited by t he individual languages.