The Nominal Nature of where, when, and how: Evidence from Free Relatives

In this squib, we argue that the wh-words where, when, and how are inherently nominal, rather than prepositional, though they are NPs with a peculiar property: they are always base-generated as the complement of a preposition (P), which is often silent. Our main evidence comes from the behavior of embedded noninterrogative wh-clauses known as free relatives (FRs). We show that this behavior can be easily accounted for if where, when, and how are inherently nominal. We bring further empirical support to our proposal by extending it to wh-interrogatives and by discussing the similarities between FRs and the NPs that have been called bare-NP adverbs or adverbial NPs (Emonds 1976, 1987, Larson 1985, McCawley 1988). We also show that potential alternative accounts that make different assumptions about the nature of where, when, and how are unable to account for the data.

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