Q-FEATURE MOVEMENT IN JAPANESE * Jason Ginsburg jginsbur@email.arizona.edu University of Arizona LSA 2006 1 Introduction • In this presentation, I will attempt to explain the following phenomena re- lated to in-situ wh-questions in Japanese: – why a wh-phrase may remain in situ. – why constructions in which a wh-phrase is supposedly contained within a wh-island are ill-formed. – why constructions in which a wh-phrase is contained within an NP- island are grammatical. • The organization of this presentation is as follows. I will: – provide a brief overview of the relevant wh-question data in Japanese. – discuss Miyagawa’s (2001) proposal (following Hagstrom 1998) that there is movement of Q-features in Japanese wh-questions. – argue that the ungrammaticality of certain wh-questions results from movement of Q-features that violates the Minimal Link Condition * I would like to thank the following people for their very helpful comments: Andrew Carnie, Heidi Harley, Simin Karimi, Yosuke Sato, and the Fall 2005 Prelim Class at the University of Arizona. 1