This chapter looks at the mutual relationships among a number of types of wh-constructions. I propose that wh-constructions (and wh-words) are organized in what I call a wh-hierarchy – beginning with simplest wh-interrogatives, going via (un)conditionals and correlatives, free relatives, and light-headed relatives, and finishing with the most complex headed relatives. This hierarchy is claimed to follow from an incremental structural growth of wh-words, mirroring the growth of the respective wh-clauses (Foc-Top-Rel-Mod). The hierarchy receives empirical support from many grammatical and linguistic domains, particularly morphology (wh-word lexicalization patterns), syntax (wh-in-situ vs. ex-situ, structural height of the wh-movement landing site), typology (cross-linguistic availability of wh-words in the individual constructions), diachrony, and L1 acquisition. The chapter builds on data from a range of genealogically and geographically distant languages, including Indo-European, Uralic, Caucasian, Mesoamerican, and Papuan.

David Wilmsen examines Maltese, a peripheral dialect of Arabic. Of those, Maltese stands out as remarkably unusual. Unlike other dialects of Arabic, it is an official language of the state in which its speakers reside, the Republic of Malta, as well as being an official language of the European Union. It boasts a long literary tradition, a language academy, an active press, scholarly journals and societies devoted to it, and an ever-growing digital presence, including a large online, freely accessible corpus encompassing hundreds of millions of words. It is therefore an easily accessible language for linguistic research. The chapter examines Maltese in light of linguistic thinking about so-called enclave dialects, showing that Maltese conforms to the general characteristics of remnant dialect groupings, in that it does borrow from the languages with which it comes into contact, it does undergo independent internal change, and it does retain features of its founder languages. As such, Maltese can be instrumental in demarking the latest date for the emergence of a range of features found variously in mainland dialects of Arabic.

This chapter develops an approach to questions as sets of possible answers, with answers now construed as sets of assignments (possibilities). Type-driven movement of the question operator introduces quantification over assignments. Compositional derivations are provided for various types of shifting phenomena, such as in yes/no questions, wh questions, “interrogative flip,” and conditional and correlative questions. Additional topics for discussion include D-linking and weak crossover with wh words; commonalities among interrogative, conditional, and correlative clauses; and comparisons among expressions analyzed as choice-function pronouns throughout the book (wh words, relative words, indefinites, anaphoric proforms, names).