Séminaire de Recherche: Maria Teresa Guasti (U. Milano Bicocca)

Questioning in Time and Space - Mar 8 Mar - 12h15 - L208

I will start from TIME and specifically from Italian acquisition showing that there is a subject/object asymmetry in the production (and comprehension) of wh-questions in children and adults, which manifest differently. This asymmetry will be explained by exploiting Franck et al.’s (2006) proposal on the two step theory of agreement (Guasti, Branchini and Arosio, in press). CLAIM 1: Object questions are more difficult than subject questions because they features intervention of an object copy on the AGREE relation between the AgrS (Infl) and the thematic subject. Then, I will discuss the predictions of this theory and test it with data on the acquisition of English and Hebrew wh-questions. I will leave the realm of acquisition and move to SPACE specifically to restrictions in the formation of wh-questions in languages such as Tagalog, Malagasy and Indonesian. In these languages, only the “surface subject” can be questioned and it can only be through a cleft. I derive these two properties from the CLAIM 1 and the assumption that an argument moved to a criterial position is frozen there (Rizzi, 2003). Finally, I will discuss the consequences of my claims for the competence/performance or grammar/parser dichotomy.

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