Caponigro on Free Relatives

Ivano Caponigro. “The semantic contribution of wh-words and type shifts: evidence from free relatives crosslinguistically.” (to appear). In Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) XIV. Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications, Cornell University.

Free relatives (henceforth, FRs) are embedded non-interrogative wh-clauses like what Adam cooked in Jie tasted what Adam cooked. They are attested crosslinguistically. So far, I have found them in twenty-eight languages besides English. The main goal of this paper is to show that a crosslinguistic investigation of the semantic behavior of FRs sheds light on the semantic contribution of wh-words and gives further empirical support to the existence of type-shifting rules in the grammar whose purpose is to deal with type-mismatches.