Typology of Tigrinya WH-interrogatives

International audience In this paper, we investigate wh-interrogatives in Tigrinya. We show that Tigrinya at least employs three independent strategies, including the cross-linguistically known wh-in-situ and wh-movement, to express content questions. First, we dem\-onstrate that wh-interrogatives in Tigrinya occur in different syntactic positions, suggesting that the simple parametric dichotomy between wh-in-situ and wh-move\-ment does not explain all the facts in Tigrinya. Then, we run syntactic diagnostics, such as long distance dependency, reconstruction effects, weak crossover and island effects, and show that the three strategies indeed exhibit different sensitivities to the list of syntactic diagnostics. Finally, we examine some interpretive properties, namely presuppositionality and exhaustivity, of the three wh-interrogative strategies and we observe that while the wh-in-situ and wh-movement strategies exhibit no exhaustivity effects, the third strategy appears sensitive to both interpretive properties.