Discontinuous DPs, Wh -in-Situ, and Lower Copy Pronunciation in Chichewa

This paper offers a lower copy pronunciation account of two underexplored issues in Chichewa: wh-in-situ and discontinuous DPs. First, it is shown that Chichewa wh-in-situ is island-sensitive, and thus is best analyzed as a hidden case of wh-movement in narrow syntax, with the lower, postverbal copy of the wh-element pronounced. Second, discontinuous object DPs involve total dislocation of the entire object in syntax; at PF, the phonological features of its copies are deleted in a distributed manner, resulting in surface discontinuity. The study provides novel empirical evidence that supports the conceptually desirable idea that, for reasons of modularity, lower copy pronunciation is conditioned solely by PF factors, since it is shown that lower copy pronunciation in Chichewa, which is identified in both wh-in-situ and DP splits, results from a PF requirement. The requirement in question is further suggested to be associated with the residual conjoint/disjoint alternation in Chichewa syntax, which is not easy to see since the disjoint marker got lost morphologically, as a result of a diachronic change.