Dyakonova (2009) argues that Russian must be grouped together with French, since both languages allow two strategies of formation of wh-questions: wh-ex-situ and wh-in-situ (for French, see Mathieu 1999; Bošković 1998b, 2000; Boeckx 2000;
Cheng & Rooryck 2000 and others).11 As is well-known, French allows non-echo
questions both with a fronted wh-item and with wh-in-situ, the latter option being restricted to matrix contexts:
(44) a. (*Je me demande) tu as vu qui. (French)
I REFL wonder you have seen who.ACC
‘(I wonder) who have you seen?’
b. (Je me demande) qui as-tu vu ti.
I REFL wonder who.ACC have-you seen [from Dyakonova 2009:197]
As discussed in previous sections, similarly to French, Russian wh-phrases, when fronted, do not necessarily appear at the leftmost position (recall that the
wh-in-situ option is generally restricted to echo questions). As noticed by
Dyakonova, Russian questions in which the wh-word does not occupy a clause- initial position obtain a particular interpretation, different from questions with overt wh-movement. This interpretation is similar to the French questions with
wh-in-situ, as in (44a). Namely, such questions usually imply that the event being
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asked about is presupposed to be necessarily true. Thus, (44a) cannot be answered with a negative answer, like nobody, as well as its Russian counterpart in (45):12
(45) (V magazine) ty kogo uvidel? (Russian)
in the.shop you who.ACC saw
‘Who did you see (in the shop)?
Moreover, Dyakonova observes that in Russian questions, when a wh-word does not occupy the leftmost position, it cannot appear within the scope of negation and Intervention effects arise. However, no Intervention effects will obtain if the
wh-word appears clause-initially, i.e., above negation. This is illustrated in (46):
(46) a. Kuda ty ne budeš’ bol’še ezdit’? (Russian)
where you NEG will.2SG from.now.on go.INF
‘Where are you not going anymore?’
b. ?? Ty ne budeš’ kuda bol’še ezdit’?
you NEG will.2SG where from.now.on go.INF
[from Dyakonova 2009:198-199] A similar correlation between the wh-phrases and negation has been attested in French. This is illustrated below:
(47) a. * Jean ne mange pas quoi? (French)
Jean NEG eats NEG what.ACC
‘What doesn’t Jean eat?’
b. Que Jean ne mange-t-il pas?
what.ACC Jean NEG eats.he NEG [from Dyakonova 2009:198]
On the basis of these and other data, Dyakonova elaborates the following proposal for single wh-questions in Russian. In the spirit of Cable’s (2007) theory, the author argues that interrogative clause-typing is achieved by a Q-particle, which has to move to CP (in her terminology, Inter(rogative)P). Dyakonova claims that in Russian the Q-particle can enter into the derivation in two different ways. As in standard wh-fronting languages, Q in Russian tends to merge together with the wh-phrase in its base position (see chapter 2 for
12 For a more detailed comparison between Russian and French, the reader is referred to
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discussion). In this case, it projects a QP phrase, which moves to CP and pied- pipes the wh-word. As a result, overt wh-movement is obtained.
On the other hand, along the lines of Cheng & Rooryck’s (2000) proposal, Dyakonova argues that Q in Russian can be also merged directly on the head of InterP, similarly to wh-in-situ languages. Roughly, assuming Pesetsky & Torrego’s (2007) feature specification mechanism, Dyakonova claims that the Q-feature on C is underspecified for a wh-value ([uQ: _]), in the sense that it has to agree with some wh-item. Such wh-agreement in principle can be made at distance, but for some reasons C cannot “see” the wh-word at its base position, inside vP. As a result, the wh-word has to raise to the preverbal area.
To make the discussion in hand more concrete, consider the questions in (48a). Leaving the irrelevant details aside, according to Dyakonova, the question is derived along the lines in (48b):
(48) a. My na vyxodnyh budem čtoi delat’ ti? (Russian)
we on weekends will.1PL what.ACC do.INF
‘What are we going to do on weekends?’
b. [InterP Interº[Q: _] Q[iQ] [IP my budem čto[wh] delat’ ti]]?
Agree
[adopted from Dyakonova 2009:211]
Assuming Svenonius’ (2004a) analysis of aspectual prefixes and den Dikken’s (2007) phase extension hypothesis, Dyakonova suggests that in Russian the phase
vP might extend to AspP after obligatory v-to-Asp verb movement. The author
argues that in (48), the wh-phrase, a goal, will become opaque due to PIC, if it remains inside vP. In order to prevent this, the wh-word moves to Spec,AspP. To advance, in the next chapter I will adopt and further elaborate the aforementioned Dyakonova’s (2009) insight. In particular, I will extend it to multiple wh-questions.
Unhappily, Dyakonova does not offer any articulated account of the attested puzzles regarding the MWF phenomenon in Russian, such as Superiority effects,
wh-constituency and intervening material, among others. Following Cable (2007),
Dyakonova vaguely suggests that the lack of Superiority effects is because of a different feature specification of the interrogative head present in Russian lexicon and that such C can agree with only one Q. However, the whole set of the relevant data discussed so far is left aside and does not easily follow from this assumption. As we will see in the next section, Cable’s (2007, 2010) Q-theory, in its original formulation, does not easily account for the complex set of Russian
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data. Therefore, some additions to the Q-based theory will be offered in the next chapter.