Interpretive effects in multiple interrogation

Superiority phenomena in multiple WH-questions are analyzed as an effect of a range of sentence-level but discourse-related contingencies centering around question focus and concomitant constraints on question structure. It is argued that multiple interrogation formations in English are restricted by constraints ensuring the informativeness of the question focus: These constraints interact with intonational and logophoric characteristics of the sentence to determine felicity of multiple interrogation structures. In particular, subject-object and argument-adjunct asymmetries in focus projection from a lexical item receiving primary stress translate into similar asymmetries in multiple interrogation structures. The proposed model accounts for systematic amelioration and degradation effects by invoking principled contingencies and by appeal to a contextual dependency spectrum allowing amelioration via targeted manipulation, such that question-internal structural adjustments affecting focus projection and question-external contextual priming can satisfy the informativeness requirements of multiple interrogation structures.