Wh-copying, phases, and successive cyclicity

This paper re-examines the wh-copying phenomenon that is attested in a number of languages including German, Frisian, Afrikaans, and Romani, in the context of Chomskyʹs (Chomsky, N., 1998. Minimalist inquiries: the framework. MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics 15. MITWPL, Cambridge, MA) phase-based approach to syntactic derivation. Wh-copying is traditionally thought to provide strong evidence for the successive-cyclic nature of wh-movement. Besides the more general problem of how intermediate movement steps are formally triggered, however, the wh-copying phenomenon raises the questions of what grammatical condition or conditions should permit (or possibly, force) the phonetic realisation of intermediate wh-copies, why the spelling-out of locally uninterpretable copies of a wh-operator does not cause the derivation to crash at the phase level, and to what extent their presence poses a problem for the principle of Full Interpretation and for Kayneʹs (Kayne, R., 1994. The Antisymmetry of Syntax. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA) Linear Correspondence Axiom. It is shown that an analysis of wh-copying in terms of the discontinuous spelling-out of a wh-expressionʹs ‘operator’ and ‘core’ parts, in conjunction with a convergence-based view of phases, not only helps provide answers to the above questions, but also accounts for some otherwise difficult-to-explain restrictions on wh-copying.