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Last revised 6 June 2002
This paper is forthcoming in Lingua (accepted, with revisions, June 2002). It is a heavy revision of "Adjunct preposing, wh-interrogatives and dependency competition", UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 10 (1998), 441-66.
Adjuncts may occur (by ‘adjunct preposing') before a wh-interrogative clause which is a main clause, but not before one which is subordinate; for example: (i) Tomorrow what shall we do? (ii) I told you (*tomorrow) what we shall do. Why should the possibility of adjunct preposing vary between main and subordinate clauses? The pre-theoretical answer is obvious: the wh-word has the extra function in a subordinate clause of signalling the start of a subordinate clause, so like any other subordinator it must be the first element in its clause. Less obvious is how to capture this insight in a formal grammar, and the paper will show that this challenge favours flexible word-based grammars over the more familiar kind which assign a uniform clause structure. The paper considers and rejects a number of examples of the latter approach, especially that of Rizzi 1997. The proposed solution is based on enriched dependency structure (Word Grammar) which makes head-hood ambiguous in certain constructions. In particular, the head of a wh-interrogative may be its finite verb when it is a main clause but must be the wh-element when it is subordinate.
Key words: Word Grammar, adjunct-preposing, wh-interrogative, head, dependency grammar, English, left periphery, functional category