Karen Hovind

RTG PhD student, member since 2021

Project "Wh-less degree questions"

The wh-less degree questions, or Null-Degree Questions (NDQs; Svenonius and Kennedy 2006, S&K), found in dialectal Norwegian are an instance of 0:1 form-meaning mismatch: while they are unambiguously interpreted as constituent questions asking for degrees (S&K 2006), they involve no (overt) morphosyntactic wh-component. This also renders them string-identical to polar questions (PQs). Several factors, however, set them apart from regular PQs, one of which being the phonological profile of the NDQ (marked by capital letters):

ER du gammel? HAR du mange katte?

are you old have you many cats

“How old are you? How many cats do you have?”

On the one side: S&K (2006) find that NDQs are not PQs, neither morphosyntactically nor semantically, and offer a formal analysis based on the analogy of the Icelandic hvað-construction, involving a covert wh-operator in SpecCP. This further explains the inversion word-order found in most NDQs.

On the other: A covert-wh-analysis is challenged by other distributional facts, particularly from embedded NDQs (i.a. headed by polar complementisers). As it stands, the NDQ seems to pattern partly as a wh-question, and partly as a PQ. Other factors relating to in-situ/ex-situ readings and island constraints, raise further questions.