Pied piping is a local dependency

Abstract

To model the pied piping in interrogative and exclamative clauses Ginzburg & Sag (2000) proposes a nonlocal head-driven treatment, thus emphasizing the resemblances with extraction. This treatment has a number of drawbacks: it relies on poorly motivated lexical rules and nonbranching phrase structure rules, it makes false predictions about pied piping in PPs, and it presupposes an implausible structure for NPs with predeterminers. To solve these problems I propose an alternative in which pied piping is treated as a local functor-driven dependency. Technically, the WH feature is integrated in the CATEGORY objects, and the propagation of its values is modeled by constraints which are independently needed for the treatment of other phenomena.