Topics in Anatolian Historical Grammar Prof. Dr. H. Craig Melchert

2.1. Movement driven by features
On the Hittite Preposed Relative Clause 5
Wh-movement is an operation induced by morphosyntactic features. Crosslinguistically,
question words generally display certain morphological regularities;
these expressions make up a limited class of words that are morphologically
related, share a semantic commonality, and display the same syntactic behavior
(Adger 2003:285–7):
(5) a. English: who, what, where, when
b. French: qui, quoi, où, quand
c. Kiowa: hatel, honde, haya
d. Hebrew: mi, mah, ayin, matay
e. Hittite: kui, kuit, kuwapi
In languages which exhibit wh-movement, the wh-phrases must obligatorily
move to the highest specifier position of the CP, whether they be a subject, an
object, a prepositional or an adverbial wh-expression. This syntactic behavior and
the common semantics are easily demonstrated in the case of English, a well
documented wh-move language (modified from Adger 2003:288):
(6) Who read the book?
For which X, X a human, is it the case that X read the book.
(7) When did you read the book?
For which X, X a time, is it the case that you read the book at time X.
(8) Which student read the book?
For which X, X a student, is it the case that X read the book.
(9) What did she read?
For which X, X a thing, is it the case that she read X.
The same applies to English why, where, and how. The mechanics of whmovement
are just as in (3a) above, and repeated here (10). 1 Most variability
cross-linguistically is linked to the strength properties of features of functional
heads: strong features trigger movement, and if a feature is weak, the element
remains in situ, as illustrated in the following Mandarin Chinese example (11).
Now let us examine a few interrogatives in the Hittite corpus to determine
whether the language is of the wh-move or wh-in-situ type.
1 For more on feature checking see Adger 2003:291.