Restrictions on wh-in-situ in Kavalan and Amis

This paper investigates the grammatical properties of wh-in-situ constructions in Kavalan and Amis, two Austronesian languages in Taiwan. In Kavalan, interrogative phrases cannot stay in-situ in the subject position, except for the wh-word that denotes ‘which’. However, all Amis wh-phrases, regardless of their case marking or grammatical function, can stay in-situ. The paper discusses the implications of the wh-in-situ patterns in the two languages for the explanations that have been proposed to account for the wh-in-situ constructions in Austronesian languages: the semantic/pragmatic approach (Richards 1998; Sabel 2003) and the formal-marking approach (Law 2006)