A minimalist approach to locality restrictions on wh-movement in Iraqi Arabic

الملخص EN

This paper presents a new set of data concerning the behavior of wh-operators in Iraqi Arabic (IA).

It argues that Logical Form (LF) movement (Huang, 1982) in IA must observe a Locality Constraint (Rizzi,1990, Chomsky,1995, Richard,1997) according to which the wh operator must move to the closest Spec position of a [+wh] Complementizer (Comp).

Wh-operators in IA may occur in the Spec of the matrix Comp as in English or in-situ as in Chinese (Huang, 1994:149).

However, unlike Chinese and English, IA wh-operators may also occur in any Spec of an intermediate Comp between the matrix Comp and the in-situ position.

The wh-operator exercises wide scope over the entire question whether it occurs in-situ, in the Spec of the intermediate Comp or in the matrix Comp (Wahba, 1986, 1991).

This paper argues that this economy condition can elegantly be captured by Chomsky’s Principles and Parameters (Chomsky, 1986) and the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995).

This paper is organized as follows: section (1) introduces the main diagnostics of wh-questions in IA.

Section (2) investigates the behavior of wh-operators in mono-clausal questions.

Section (3) analyzes the behavior of Bi- Clausal Questions with [+wh] and [-wh) Embedded Comp IA.

Section (4) concludes