Focus Intervention Effects in Questions

Abstract

Introduction Beck (1996) and Beck & Kim (1997) discuss the interaction between wh-in-situ elements and quantifiers, and propose that an intervening quantifier blocks LF movement of wh-in-situ to an operator position. This “intervention effect” is further discussed by Pesetsky (2000) with reference to LF feature movement. Wh-intervention effects exist in a wide variety of languages (see e.g. Hoji 1985 for Japanese, Kim 2002 for Malayalam, Beck 1996 for Hindi/Urdu and Turkish). Despite its apparent universal character, the intervention effect shows some crosslinguistic variation. It is not even the case that all quantifiers induce an intervention effect for wh-in-situ in Korean. For example, quantifiers like most N or always/often do not induce intervention effects in Korean.