Slovenian questions with short wh-movement and the low periphery

Abstract

In this paper I establish multiple wh-questions with short wh-movement, i.e. questions in which at least one wh-phrase moves to the clause initial position while the rest move to some clause internal position, following the subject, as a separate type of multiple wh-questions in Slovenian. Crucially, questions with short whmovement can be taken as evidence for the existence of a clause internal, low periphery in Slovenian, and I argue that the short moved wh-phrase undergoes wh-movement to the Wh-projection of the low periphery. Furthermore, I show that the low periphery in Slovenian also hosts the Topic and the Focus projection.

Slovenian is a language with multiple wh-fronting, but other types of multiple wh-questions also exist in Slovenian, as I show in section 1, all of which receive the same interpretation. And while it was shown by Golden (1997) that the fronted wh-phrases in questions with multiple wh-fronting can be separated by non-wh-material, such as parentheticals or clitics, and it was shown by Mišmaš (2016) that topic and focus phrases can appear between fronted wh-phrases, this paper shows that the subject that appears between the fronted wh-phrases is not necessarily a subject or a focus. Based on the interpretation of adverbs, following Bošković (1997), I show that the non-initial wh-phrase in questions with multiple wh-fronting and short wh-movement does not move to the same position in the left periphery. But despite the differences between the two types of questions, section 3 shows that the wh-phrases in both questions with multiple wh-fronting and short wh-movement display parallel behavior with respect to topic and focus phrases in that these phrases can appear in any word order possible.

Based on the data in sections 2 and 3, it is proposed that the non-initial wh-phrase in multiple wh-questions with short wh-movement moves to the Wh-projection in the low periphery, which can also host focus phrases in the Focus and topic phrases in the Topic projection. These projections are not obligatory in Slovenian, they can appear in any order possible and can be repeated in the structure. The former is especially important in light of the existence of multiple wh-questions, i.e. there must exist the option of projecting enough Wh-projections to host all the fronted (non-initial) wh-phrases.

Multiple wh-questions with short wh-movement offer an initial insight into the structure of the low periphery, however, more work is needed in order to better understand its structure and to establish to which extend the low periphery is similar/different from the remaining peripheries in Slovenian and in general.