On Tsou Wh-Questions: Movement or in Situ?

The paper deals with the syntactic status of wh-questions in Tsou. Assuming that some typological distinctions among languages are recognized from the formation of wh-questions, some languages like English show S-structure movement of the wh-words, in contrast to languages like Mandarin Chinese, in which wh-words remains ‘in-situ’ at S-structure. However, Tsou has two ways to construct wh-questions: it allows typical wh-in-situ’s as well as fronted wh-words. The aim of this paper is first to show evidence that the sentences with apparently fronted wh-words in Tsou are in fact instances of cleft equational sentences. In turn, based on the absence of island effects, I argue that Tsou is truly a wh-in-situ language, where no actual movement of the wh-words is involved. Finally, the presence of donkey sentences in Tsou further suggests that it is unselective binding, rather than movement, that plays a role in forming wh-dependency.