Multiple WH-Phrases and the WH-Scope-Marker Strategy in Hungarian Interrogatives

The paper assesses earlier analyses of the Wh-scope-marker/partial Wh-movement phenomenon and tests an alternative account developed on the basis of Hungarian in Horvath (1995; to appear) in light of novel types of evidence, involving scope-marker constructions with multiple contentive Wh-phrases in their embedded clause.Multiple Wh data in Hungarian are shown to offer an ideal testing ground, due to the variety of syntactic options they display. After reviewing the two major syntactically distinct types of multiple Wh-questions, we explore the adequacy of direct Wh-dependency/Wh-chain accounts and indirect Wh-dependency/CP-as-associate accounts of Wh scope-marking. We discuss three distinct sets of phenomena involving multiple Wh-phrases generated in the embedded CP of the scope-marker construction, which differ from each other in terms of having interrogative ([+WH]) vs. declarative ([-WH]) selecting matrix predicates, and in terms of the syntactic position of the multiple Wh-phrases within their embedded CP. The first two patterns analyzed will confirm Horvath's (1995; to appear) conclusion regarding the inadequacy of any direct dependency account, and the superiority of the indirect dependency approach for this empirical domain. The third pattern of data, involving "split" multiple Wh-interpretations, will be shown to provide (further) evidence in favor of a syntacticassociation between the "scope marker" and the embedded CP motivated in Horvath (1995; to appear), as opposed to Dayal's (1994) purely semantics-basedindirect dependency account.