Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons^™

How Far Can They Go?: Non-Native Speakers Of Spanish And Wh- Questions, Maria Turrero Garcia

Doctoral Dissertations

The wh- island is a syntactic phenomenon that constitutes a constraint on wh- movement with implications for interpretation (the speaker must be aware of the distinction between arguments and adjuncts, and of the effects of the [-QU] feature on the middle wh- word against extraction) and for production (the speaker needs to know the limited, short distance scope of the fronted wh- word in adjunct questions). In Spanish, each wh- word carries a referential value that affects its classification as an adjunct or an argument, hence affecting the extractability of each wh- word from a complex question containing a wh- …