Feature 8. Long movement and wh-scope marking

found in question(s): 18, 19a, 19b

Definition and illustration

This feature investigates the formation of long-distance questions, i.e., where a constituent of an embedded clause is questioned as the object in (1):

(1)

Same languages have a version of this where a dummy/expletive like wh-element occurs in the scope position, while the true wh-phrase occurs at the edge of the embedded clause. The following example is from German:

(2)

This construction is called wh-scope marking/partial movement (see Fanselow 2017). According to the literature (Fanselow 2025), there is a tendency for languages with wh-scope marking to have OV-order (OV-languages that have it only seem to be of the less-strict type). It is sometimes thought that scope marking occurs in those languages that do not have long-distance movement as in (1). Two questions investigate these correlations.

Correlations

Question 18 tests for the possibility of long-distance movement in the language.

Question 19 tests for the availability of the scope-marking construction. Based on the literature, one can derive the following predictions:

• Prediction 1 (tentative): wh-scope marking construction → O-V/"less strict" V-O
• Prediction 2 (tentative): *long wh-movement → wh-scope marking construction (in wh-ex situ languages)

Results

Prediction 1 was partly disconfirmed in Fanselow (2025). Whether prediction 2 holds cross-linguistically requires further investigation.

References