The Wh-Expletive Construction

This paper is the first to provide an analysis of the wh-expletive scope-marking (or partial movement) construction in the non-derivational framework of Lexical Functional Grammar. This construction is an interrogative in which a wh-phrase takes matrix scope even though it appears in an embedded question. The scope of the 'true' wh-phrase in the embedded clause must be marked by the presence of a wh-word in the matrix clause.

After exploring the generalisations which can be made about this construction, data are presented which show that the wh-word in the matrix clause is an expletive associated with an embedded interrogative clause. I argue that the relationship between the two is an example of functional control in which the f-structure of an interrogative COMP is shared with a wh-expletive which bears the discourse function FOCUS.

This analysis accounts for the set of properties which define the wh-expletive construction cross-linguistically. In addition, it ensures that the f-structures of wh-fronting and wh-expletive constructions with equivalent meaning are different and therefore the two cannot be compared in terms of economy.