S-Lab - Mal Shah / WH and ellipsis in Hindi
S-Lab - Mal Shah / WH and ellipsis in Hindi
Tuesday November 28, S-Lab features a discussion of work in progress from Mal Shah, abstracted below, on Hindi wh-constructions and ellipsis, following up on work from 16 years ago by then PhD students Pritha Chandra *07 and Shiti Malhotra *11.
Hindi-Urdu displays a 'scope-marking' construction. The word kyaa (`what') appears in embedding clauses when a speaker wants to question a constituent in an embedded clause. I argue here that the scope-marker kyaa is interpreted, against analyses that take it to be an expletive. The main data I provide comes from sluicing, where there are clear asymmetries depending on whether the scope-marker or another wh-element is the remnant of the sluice. I identify a puzzle regarding island amnesty, and tentatively suggest that the facts can be captured assuming a Quantifier-Raising-like profile for covert wh-movement in Hindi, as well as a 'short-source' theory of sluicing.