Wh-which relatives and the existence of pied-piping

Abstract

This paper describes and offers an analysis of a kind of relative clause acceptable to some English speakers that we call a wh-which relative, e.g. the snowmen whom (of) which the children loved. We propose that these relatives involve the movement of a phrase headed by an element that we call R, analogous to the Q posited by Cable (2010a; 2010b) for interrogatives — the optional of in the example above being an overt form of a special variant of R. The syntax of this variant resembles particularly closely the variant of Q proposed by Coon (2009) for Ch’ol interrogatives in triggering movement to its specifier — but with a puzzle that has a parallel in Finnish, for which we propose a tentative solution. The analysis thus supports the overall explanatory landscape for pied-piping phenomena proposed by Cable, but presents a challenge to his broader claim that all pied-piping phenomena can be explained in this way. If correct, it provides yet one more instance of the “unity in diversity” of syntactic structures across the world’s languages.