Re: THEORY: two questions

At 03:17 PM 4/1/2000 -0600, Matt Pearson wrote:
>My favourite example of a "decidedly non-functional" feature of grammar
>is the constraint which says that a wh-phrase may not move out of
>one half of a coordinate structure--i.e. the ungrammaticality of sentences
>such as "Who did you see and Bill?".  There doesn't seem to be any
>obvious communicative reason for the coordinate structure constraint.
>Sentences like "Who did you see and Bill?" are not especially difficult
>to process (no more so than many other constructions which are judged
>grammatical).  And yet, in every language that I'm aware of where this
>phenomenon has been tested, such sentences are judged ungrammatical,
>and are rarely if ever produced spontaneously.  I find it hard to believe
>that the coordinate structure constraint is the product of functional
>parameters or darwinian selectional pressures.  It just appears to be an
>arbitrary side-effect of language design.
Does this constraint also apply to languages where wh-words aren't fronted?

For instance, I seem to remember reading that in Turkish, the interrogative
pronoun is either left in situ or moved to the focus position immediately
before the verb (which is normally at the end of the sentence), so that
your example would appear as:

Bill-ACC and who-ACC see-PAST-2SG

So would this also be ungrammatical in Turkish?

(In Turkish, IIRC, the position immediately before the verb happens to be
the "in situ" position for the direct object as well as the focus position.)

- Tim