On wh-movement in Spanish Echo Questions

Abstract

This paper examines Spanish echo questions, an understudied phenomenon even in extensively described languages such as English. In particular, it focuses on a very particular type of echo questions, such as those made in response to a previous yes/no question (e.g. –Did you buy {mumble}?; –Did I buy what?) and makes a detailed description, on the one hand, of inherent echo features, common across most languages, and, on the other, those language-specific. In particular, I argue that wh-in-situ is not the only possible option in Spanish EQs in order to get a proper, echo interpretation. In addition, I offer some evidence from Spanish data in favour of a particular syntactic structure underlying this sort of questions (Sobin 2010).

Keywords

• wh-movement
• wh-in-situ
• echo questions
• discourse