Wh-Questions: A Case Study in Czech

In the empirical, descriptive sections of this monograph the author develops standard argumentation in favour of the structurally-based transformational nature of Wh-questions in English and Czech. She demonstrates how Wh-questions in Slavic languages first impacted the theoretical discussion and how their description challenged some earlier assumptions based on specifically English data. The study provides a historical survey of the analyses which reflect the development of the field. Individual chapters are devoted to comparing extraction domains, locality conditions, and constraints defined in terms of the structures proposed. The Wh-characteristics are compared with Focus/ Contrastive Topic re-orderings, which leads to an improved structural analysis, using the concept of a Split CP. In spite of the demonstrable progress of the research, many so far unexplained aspects of the Wh-phenomena will without doubt continue to provide an interesting source for future research on the structure of human language.