Abstract

In this squib, we argue that the wh-words where, when, and how are inherently nominal, rather than prepositional, though they are NPs with a peculiar property: they are always base-generated as the comple-ment of a preposition (P), which is often silent. Our main evidence comes from the behavior of embedded noninterrogative wh-clauses known as free relatives (FRs). We show that this behavior can be easily accounted for if where, when, and how are inherently nominal. We bring further empirical support to our proposal by extending it to wh-interrogatives and by discussing the similarities between FRs and the NPs that have been called bare-NP adverbs or adverbial NPs (Emonds 1976, 1987, Larson 1985, McCawley 1988). We also show that potential alternative accounts that make different assumptions about the nature of where, when, and how are unable to account for the data. 1 Two Puzzles FRs exhibit two puzzling syntactic/semantic properties when intro-duced by wh-words like where, when, or how (henceforth, w/w/h FRs). First, they have the same distribution and interpretation as either PPs or NPs (first noticed by Bresnan and Grimshaw (1978:sec. 5)).1 What looks like the very same w/w/h FR can be replaced and paraphrased with a PP or an NP, depending on the matrix clause. Examples of w/w/h FRs are given in (1)–(3). Example (a) of each pair shows a bracketed w/w/h FR occurring as the complement of the matrix predi-cate, as well as its NP paraphrase. Example (b) of each pair shows the same w/w/h FR occurring as an adjunct of the matrix clause, as well as its PP paraphrase. We are very grateful to Grant Goodall, Richard Larson, Howard Lasnik, Carson Schütze, two anonymous reviewers, and the participants at the Syntax