Why *'if or not but ✓ whether or not'

• Danfeng Wu ^[1]
  1. [1] MIT
• Localización: Linguistic inquiry, ISSN 0024-3892, Vol. 53, Nº 2, 2022, págs. 412-425
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • This squib provides an account of a contrast between whether and if in English, manifested in the contrast between the grammaticality of I don’t know whether or not Pat will arrive and the ungrammaticality of *I don’t know if or not Pat will arrive. I argue that this contrast can be explained if we assume that whether can pied-pipe, but there is no pied-piping in if-questions. Strikingly, once the pied-piping parse for whether is eliminated, it behaves like if. Then I show that this contrast exists crosslinguistically: Polish alternative questions behave like whether-questions because pied-piping is possible, and Bengali alternative questions behave like if-questions because pied-piping is not possible.