This article explores the problem of information structure in ancient Greek direct constituent questions from the perspective of wh‐placement. It begins with the observation that wh‐items are intrinsically focused and that typologically, wh‐placement is predictable based on the focusing properties in some languages, such as Indonesian (in situ strategy) and Basque or Hungarian (focus position strategy), but not in others, such as English (specific wh‐position strategy). Ancient Greek has multiple ways to express narrow focusing, e.g., in situ or in a preverbal devoted position. Puzzlingly, with respect to whPs, the former way is only marginally attested and there is no good evidence for the latter way. Instead, based on syntactic and prosodic tests, we show that ancient Greek offers a third strategy, in which a high position in the structure is available. Nevertheless, when this result is recast in the framework of Phase Theory, the tests of wh‐duplication and stranding indicate that whPs must go through all three positions, receiving their argument function in situ, checking their focus feature preverbally and verifying their wh‐feature in the high position. The specificity of ‘why’ questions is addressed along the way.

In ancient Greek, relative pronouns are, as a rule, subject to wh-movement and obligatorily surface at the left edge of the relative clause. However, the archaic poet Pindar sometimes allows material belonging to the relative clause to appear in front of the relative pronoun, which is then postponed within its clause. In this paper, I survey all relative clauses in the surviving texts by Pindar and study the possible differences in semantics and syntax between relative clauses with initial and postponed relative pronouns, which turn out to be indistinguishable in both respects. I suggest that postponed relative pronouns do move syntactically to the Spec of their relative clause but are then optionally treated as postpositive words and surface in second position in the relative clause. Phonological arguments, based on the distributional properties of postpositive words and on the metrical makeup of Pindar’s texts, are put forward to show how postponed relative pronouns select a host at the left edge of the relative clause and incorporate phonologically to it. The informational status of relative pronouns as ratified (given) topics triggers their phonological demoting, which turns them into postpositive words, a regular process in ancient Greek. Approaching the position of relative pronouns as a conflict between syntactic and (informationally driven) phonological alignment explains why Pindar’s strategy for relativization remained rare in ancient Greek and eventually disappeared: It took one specific poetic genre to allow phonology to outrank syntax.

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