Licensing Wh‐in‐situ

This article examines French wh‐ in‐situ. We argue that wh‐ in‐situ in French is licensed by an intonation morpheme, which also licenses yes/no questions. Movement of a Q‐feature of an in‐situ wh‐ word is required to disambiguate the underspecified intonation morpheme. The underspecification nature of this intonation morpheme leads to limited distribution of French wh‐ in‐situ. We further compare French wh‐ in‐situ with Chinese and Portuguese, showing that wh‐ in‐situ in different languages can in fact have different properties.