Notes on computational linguistics.pdf - UCLA Department of ...

Stabler - Lx 185/209 2003
10.6.5 Pied piping
In English, both of the following questions are well-formed:
(24) Who did you talk to?
(25) To whom did you talk?
In the latter question, it appears that the PP moves because it contains awh-DP.
To allow for this kind of phenomenon, suppose we allow a kind of merge, where the wh-features of a selected
item can move to the head of the selector. Surprisingly, this addition alters the character of our formal system
rather dramatically, because we lose the following fundamental property:
In MG derivations (and in derivations involving head movement, adjunction, and coordination) the sequence
of features in every derived chain is a suffix of some sequence of features of a lexical item.
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