Edge Features and Multiple Wh-Questions

Abstract

Building on Chomsky’s (2000) proposal that A’-movement is triggered by an EPP-type of feature added to phase heads and Bošković’s (2007) proposal that the relevant feature is to be found on the moving element itself, Nunes (2020) has argued that these two apparently conflicting views ultimately instantiate different grammatical options available at UG. He shows that much of the crosslinguistic variation regarding single wh-questions hinges on whether edge features (features that trigger successive cyclic A’-movement) are lexically associated with wh-elements or phase heads and whether the edge features are intrinsically valued or unvalued. In this paper, I extend this approach to multiple wh-questions, showing that these factors also derive the basic typology of multiple wh-questions found in natural languages.