THE SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE OF WH-SYNTACTIC AMALGAMS

Abstract

Wh-Syntactic amalgams (wh-SAs) (e.g., John ate I don’t know what.) inspire empirical and theoretical interest because the underlined expression—I don’t know what—displays their complex syntactic and semantic properties. This study focuses on three basic properties of wh-SAs—the underlined expression’s opacity, the wh-phrase’s visibility to the matrix, and the categorial matching between the underlined clause and the wh-phrase. We review Kluck’s (2011, 2014) sluicing analysis of wh-SAs and identify several empirical problems that it encounters. In spirit of Huddleston and Pullum (2002), we propose an alternative analysis of wh-SAs considering what to be the syntactic and semantic head of the whole expression and the rest—I don’t know—to be a type of parenthetical.