Video 12.4 Wh-movement in Embedded Clauses
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 ม.ค. 2025
- Andrew Carnie presents Syntax: A Generative Introduction 4E. Wiley Blackwell.
Video 12.4 Wh-movement in Embedded Clauses
Carnie runs through the derivation of a sentence where there is wh-movement to the specifier of an embedded CP.
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Thank you very much for all the amazing videos! Truly invaluable for laymen such as myself!
There's something I'm not completely clear on:
I wonder if the wh-phrase in constructions such as the ones discussed in this video is necessarily in the SpecCP position and as a result of wh-movement.
A verb like "wonder" always takes a CP complement, and so it makes sense that in a sentence like "I wonder what she did," the "what she did" is a CP, with "what" in SpecCP position as a result of wh-movement.
However, constructions that (at least on the surface) look identical to this one can also be found with verbs that never take CP complements, as in "I will eat what you give me."
It seems to me that "eat" cannot (semantically) be understood as taking a CP complement, but only a DP one, and so "what you give me" should instead be a DP, with "what" as the head, and "you give me" a CP adjunct (relative clause) with a null operator and a null complementizer, as in "what (which) (that) you give me."
Is my intuition here correct, or am I missing something?
Your intuition is not wrong. When you have a verb like "eat", you have a direct object (typically a DP). That DP can be modified by a relative clause. So a paraphrase for your sentence is "I will eat [DP the thing [CP that you gave me]]" -- see the section in the book on how relative clauses involve wh-movement. Now what is going on in your sentence is you have what we called a "Headless Relative Clause". A quick google search will bring up papers on how those are structured. But one common analysis is they are simply relative clauses that are modifying a null noun --essentially omitting "The thing" in my sentence above -- so the structure of your sentence might be something like "I will eat [DP Ø [CP what you give me]]" If that's the correct analysis of headless relative clauses, then the wh-word is in the specifier of the relative clause CP and the direct object of "eat" is a null NP that is co-indexed with the "what" operator. Needless to say, this is not the only analysis of headless relatives that has been proposed, but it's a fairly common one.
I have no idea why there is a strike through in my comment. That was not intentional.
@@CarnieSyntaxthEdition Thank you!