The Additional- wh Effect and Multiple Wh -Fronting

Abstract This chapter suggests an analysis of Saito’s (1994b) additional-wh effect which is based on a new account of multiple wh-in-situ. It will be shown that Japanese is an LP-type ‘multiple fronting language’ displaying properties analogous to languages such as Bulgarian and Romanian, which are ‘overt’ multiple fronting languages. For the latter, a new analysis in terms of formation of a wh cluster is proposed. In Section 2 of this chapter, I point out some differences between scrambling in German and scrambling in Japanese (extensively discussed in Grewendorf and Sabel 1996) that will turn out to be crucial for my analysis of the additional-wh effect (Saito 1994b). The relevant generalizations describing the additional-wh effect along with the constraints it is subject to are outlined in Section 3. In Section 4, I suggest an account of the additionalwh effect crucially based on an analysis of Japanese scrambling, according to which the particular properties of Japanese scrambling are attributed to the presence of multiple specifiers in the Japanese agreement system. This account is in turn based on a new theory of multiple wh-fronting languages.