The existence of a bundled CT head in Bahasa Indonesian

• Published in: Linguistic research Vol. 39; no. 2; pp. 297 - 326
• Main Author: Park, Dongwoo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Seoul Kyung Hee Institute for the Study of Language and Information 01.06.2022; 언어정보연구소
• Subjects: Complementizers; Copulas; Language; Predicate; Syntactic movement; Syntax; Wh phrases; 언어학
• ISSN: 1229-1374
• DOI: 10.17250/khisli.39.2.202206.003

Regarding the formation of Bahasa Indonesian wh-questions, two main approaches have been proposed - the VP-fronting approach and the wh-movement approach. In this paper, I point out that these two existing approaches cannot fully account for the peculiar property of Bahasa Indonesian multiple wh-questions whereby either the subject wh-phrase or the object wh-phrase can be extracted and located in the scope position. In order to capture this, I propose that this language has a bundled CT head, which contains the featural requirements of C and T at the same time, and that an example of it is the overt interrogative head yang. The existence of a bundled CT head is also supported by an intriguing property found in copular constructions that a wh-element replacing the referential DP can be located in the post-copular position, but not in the pre-copular position. Additionally, it is argued that the lack of the complementizer-trace effect in this language also indicates that this language does have a bundled CT head.