Pied-piping With Inversion - Introduction

Introduction

The phenomenon was first named and identified as an areal characteristic of the Mesoamerican linguistic area in Smith Stark (1988). Some sources also refer to pied-piping with inversion as "secondary wh-movement".
The phenomenon can be described as follows:

• the language has Wh-movement.
• the language has pied-piping. That is, when certain words undergo wh-movement, not only the interrogative word, but the phrase which contains this word moves.
• the word order within the pied-piped phrase is different from the order of ordinary phrases.

The following examples from San Dionisio Ocotepec Zapotec illustrate the phenomenon. As the following example shows, a possessor normally follows the noun that is possessed in this language (Broadwell 2001):

1) Cù’á Juààny .

com:grab Juan p-dog Mary

‘Juan grabbed Mary’s dog.’

*Cù’á Juààny .

com:grab Juan Mary p-dog

If the possessor is questioned, then the whole noun phrase must pied-pipe to the beginning of the sentence. However, the order of the initial phrase must have the possessor before the possessed:

2) ¿ cù’á Juààny?

who p-dog com:grab Juan

‘Whose dog did Juan grab?’

* ¿ cù’á Juààny?

p-dog who com:grab Juan

The difference in order between the noun phrases in (1) and (2) illustrates pied-piping with inversion. (1) shows the ordinary order in which the noun is the first element of the noun phrase; (2) shows the inverted order found in the pied-piped noun phrase.

The following examples from Tzotzil (Aissen 1996) show the same process:

3) I-cham -e

com-die A3-child the Xun-enc

‘Xun’s child died.’

4) i-cham?

who A3-child com-die

‘Whose child died?’