Acceso usuarios
This abstract attempts to provide an explanation for the wellknown constraint, pervasive in the Romance languages, which disallows the subject in wh-questions to intervene between a wh-phrase and the verb. It is suggested that the difference stems from a fundamental structural difference between the two types of languages. Romance, unlike English, projects an abstract Cl(itic) category above TP. Cl is an abstract operator whose function is to "externalize" an argument of a verb v with respect to the tense associated with v. Cl is identified by rich agreement or a clitic morpheme, which accounts for the presence of such a category in Romance and its absence in English. It is then argued that the projection of a Cl-operator between CP and IP in wh-questions gives rise to a minimality effect. The appendix deals with some cases of clitic-doubling of non-specific wh-phrases in modal contexts and suggests that the clitic (associated to Cl) functions as an E-type pronoun in such cases.
