On Pied-Piping

Pied-piping, the phenomenon that wh-movement may target categories not marked with the feature [wh], has generally been considered idiosyncratic and pathological. On Pied-Piping argues that this assessment is not correct. The book presents a compilation of crosslinguistic generalizations on pied-piping and a theory that derives them. Pied-piping is incorporated into a derivational theory of successive cyclic wh-movement that includes input-output optimization, the operation Agree, and phase theory. The resulting theory is a step towards closing a long-standing gap in syntactic theorizing.

Review:

Stepping aside theoretical and methodological issues, Heck has clearly done a tremendous job in gathering together a typologically diverse set of languages and providing a small range of generalizations that account for the apparent variety of PiPing. Joshua Bowles in Linguist List 20.2283