Hadas Kotek publishes article in first issue of Glossa

This summer, lecturer Hadas Kotek published an article titled “Covert partial wh-movement and the nature of derivations” in the first issue of Glossa, an online open-access journal created this year by the former editorial board of Lingua after their departure from that journal, a high-profile transition covered in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Financial Times, and The Atlantic.

Here is the abstract for Hadas’s paper:

Wh-movement is commonly thought to be caused by a syntactic probing operation, initiated by an interrogative probe on C, which triggers subsequent movement to the specifier of C. In this paper I argue that at least English covert wh-movement cannot be described in these terms. I argue instead that covert movement can target positions other than interrogative C, and that this movement is triggered by the interpretational needs of the wh-phrase itself, rather than the formal needs of interrogative C. Evidence will come from the interaction of English multiple wh-questions with intervention effects: I document a pattern of intervention effects that is explained only if English in-situ wh-phrases can be interpreted at LF in non-interrogative intermediate positions.