Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Eastern Cham (Austronesian: Vietnam) is a wh-in situ language, but wh-phrases can in some cases be moved to the left periphery, resulting in apparently optional wh-movement. Furthermore, multiple wh-phrases can be moved to the left periphery, in which case they exhibit Anti-Superiority effects. This talk demonstrates that apparent wh-movement is featurally identical to topicalization and orthogonal to the interpretation of wh-phrases, which is accomplished by covert feature movement. The Anti-Superiority effects are explained by iteration of the relevant left peripheral phrase.

Both apparent wh-movement and topicalization are then shown not to be best explained in terms of traditional information structural concepts like aboutness topic and D-linking. Instead, the movement operations are licensed by discourse connectedness (DC): a property of certain discourse anaphora where the antecedent's sentence and the anaphor's sentence are related via discourse subordination, a type of discourse or rhetorical relation best exemplified by elaboration and explanation. Putting this together, apparent wh-movement and topicalization are both instances of DC-movement. This movement reflects a property of certain discourse anaphora, not an information structural category. Finally, the optionality of DC-movement is characterized in terms of competition between different forms of anaphora: regular (in situ) anaphora and DC (moved) anaphora. Optionality arises from competing economy and interpretive constraints.