Immobile wh-phrases in Tagalog

Abstract

I argue that overt movement cannot always be triggered by a need to create a specifier for the head bearing the Probe, as commonly assumed. In Tagalog, I claim, the best description of the behavior of wh-phrases is that they must become linearly adjacent to C; I show that Tagalog wh-phrases in fact occupy several different structural positions which are consistent with this linear requirement.

Keywords

• Tagalog
• Contiguity Theory
• anti-locality
• overt movement
• vacuous movement