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Thesis (Bachelor's)

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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1946/11519

Title: 
  • The Whether Report: Reclassifying Whether as a Determiner
Degree: 
  • Bachelor's
Abstract: 
  • This paper examines the use of whether in complement clauses for the purpose of determining the exact syntactic and semantic status of whether in these clauses. Beginning with a background to the complementizer phrase, this paper will note the historical use of whether, and then examine and challenge the contemporary assertion of Radford (2004) and Newson et al. (2006) that whether is a wh-phrase. Furthermore, this paper will investigate the preclusion of whether by Radford and Newson et al. from the complementizer class.
    Following an alternative course that begins by taking into account the morphology of whether, the paper will then examine two research papers relevant to whether complement clauses. The first is Adger and Quer’s (2001) paper proposing that certain embedded question clauses have an extra element in their structure that behaves as a determiner and the second paper is from Larson (1985) proposing that or scope is assigned syntactically by scope indicators. Combining the two proposals, this paper comes to a different conclusion concerning whether and introduces a new proposal concerning the syntactic structure and semantic interpretation of interrogative complement clauses.

Accepted: 
  • May 9, 2012
URI: 
  • http://hdl.handle.net/1946/11519


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