7.3.2 Wh-movement

This is known as a multiple wh-question as it is a single question that asks for more than one piece of information. Note that both of the wh-elements may be interpreted as operators (the second one may be interpreted as an echo given the right intonation), in which case the answer to the question has to be a list of pairs ranging over likers and likees. The interesting point is that the second wh-element, although it may be interpreted as an operator, clearly has not undergone movement and so seems to violate the interpretative principle in (35). One thing is clear, however: the interpretation of this non-moved wh-element as an operator is dependent on there being a moved wh-element in the same sentence. If this were not a multiple wh-question, the wh-element would have to move. What we need then is to somehow tie the non-moved wh-element to the moved one. One possibility would be to claim that at some level of representation of the sentence which is relevant for semantic interpretation, multiple instances of wh-elements are interpreted as a single complex wh-element. Let us simply say that we indicate the interpretation of multiple wh-elements as a complex operator by coindexing them: