A New look at Northern Basque Wh-Free Relative Clauses

Ordinary Wh-Free Relative clauses are typically correlative protases, resumed by a pronoun in the apodosis to their right. They sit in the spec. of a Topic head in the left periphery or CP domain of the complex sentence. Their internal structure is shown not be always the same: when they contain a single wh- word, that item occupies another Spec,TopP position, but when there are two of them, they sit in the Spec. of two contiguous QuantifierPs. A lesser known structure is next described, in which a non-topical Wh-FR occurs within an “exotic” phrase which consists of that clause, the conjunction eta and a demonstrative pronoun: those structures are shown not to be the “source” DP of complex correlative sentences, but rather to be CPs with a predicate gap. Thus, Northern Basque standard correlative FRs are always base-generated, whereas the second type suggests a situation which is the mirror image of Bhatt's (2003) derivation of Hindi correlatives