The question particle ENN in Thuringian and its implications for the analysis of wh-drop
Andreas Pankau
June 2018 

In this paper, I challenge Bayer’s (2010) syntactic analysis of wh-drop in terms of agreement and recoverability. I argue instead that the licensing condition for wh-drop is pragmatic. The argument I develop for this analysis comes from the behavior of the particle ENN in Thuringian. The particle ENN appears in wh-questions but also in yes/no-questions. So ENN cannot be an agreement suffix for moved wh-phrases. Yet it is obligatory in wh-drop. I argue that wh-drop is only licit in clauses that are unambiguously marked as questions. This derives that ENN is required in wh-drop because enn unambiguously marks a clause as a question in Thuringian.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/003925 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	manuscript
keywords:	dialect syntax, question particle, thuringian, special questions, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [March 2018]
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