Revisiting the syntactic derivation of English split questions

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues that an English split question consists of two parts, a wh-question and an it-cleft. The former serves as a topic and is located in [Spec, TopP] and the latter as a comment and is in the complement position of Top. In the first part, the wh-phrase moves from its base position within TP to [Spec, CP] for the purpose of typing the clause as WH-interrogative. The second part has an underlying structure of ‘Is it X that-clause’, where X is put into focus and receives a focus interpretation and the ‘that-clause’ expresses presupposition. In order to highlight the focused X of a cleft, the expletive it, the auxiliary be and the presupposition are all deleted at Phonetic Form, thus deriving a well-formed split question.