What Moves Where? A Minimalist Perspective on Multiple Ka-Questions in Urdu

The current study aims to study the syntactic behaviour of double ka-expressions in Urdu multiple wh-questions in the light of Chomsky's Minimalist Program (1995) while focusing on the Attract Closest Principle (ACP) as formulated for wh-fronting languages like English (Radford, 2004). The analysis of ten sentences in Urdu, having two ka-expressions in both the subject and the object positions as well as in both the subject and object adjuncts, is carried out by minimalist tree diagram to see if and how much the ka-expressions move. The analysis reveals that there is no evidence for raising of Urdu ka-expression to Spec-CP, that the order of the two ka-expressions is mostly interchangeable, and that postverbal placement is a pragmatically marked option that is related to a surprising or emphatic meaning rather than a forced movement. The results of this study show that this is true for English-type multiple wh-questions but not for Urdu, which suggests a parametric explanation where the more salient the [wh] feature of the C, the less the necessity of closeness in cross-linguistic wh-question formation.