A DERIVATIONAL APPROACH TO SUPERIORITY EFFECTS IN ENGLISH

Abstract

This paper presents a derivational analysis of the Superiority effect observed in multiple wh-questions and Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) licensing in English, in terms of a general condition on semantic information and a make-up strategy to satisfy this condition. Assuming the definition of derivational c-command provided by Epstein et al. (1998), we argue that the licensing relation is established through c-command, and this c-command relation may not reverse in the derivation in accordance with the general condition. It is shown that our analysis can account for a wide variety of data including ones recalcitrant to previous analyses, and ultimately these phenomena can be dealt with comprehensively and in a uniform fashion.