The syntactic structures of Russian wh-questions

Abstract

This dissertation addresses a number of issues involving the syntactic structure of Russian wh-questions. This work proposes a different perspective on the syntactic structure of Russian wh-questions. The dissertation offers a comparative analysis of Russian wh-questions with other languages involving multiple wh-movement (a.o. Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian), and argues against the common perception of Russian as a language where a wh-phrase does not undergo wh-movement or show any Superiority effects. The data and analyses presented in this work argue for the opposite. The dissertation adopts the Cartographic approach to the syntactic analysis of wh-phrases in Russian.