Interrogative and Exclamative Clauses with Multiple Wh-words in Russian: An Experimental Study of Grammaticality and Felicitousness of Interpretations

At the present time, clauses with multiple wh-words are mostly considered from the point of view of syntax and pragmatics. A large number of theoretical works are devoted to them, and researchers focus on interrogative constructions with 1 / 2 wh-words and, in addition, on interpretations of such clauses in different languages. The analysis of interrogative clauses in the Russian language, conducted by K. Kazenin, C. Rudin, et. al., showed that only a part of constructions with several wh-words is grammatical. Basically, grammatical constructions are those in which both wh-words are placed on the left periphery, and those clauses in which only one wh-word is moved to the left are ungrammatical. Such approaches proved controversial, and A. Stepanov, T. Scott proposed a new one: some constructions in which the wh-word is shifted to the left, and the other remains in the in-situ position, can be grammatical. The approaches proposed by V. Gribanova, L. Grebenyova, and N. Rojina regarding the interpretation of such constructions with multiple wh-words were that the syntactic structure would limit the use of pair-list interpretation in a sentence with a composition, while a single-pair interpretation might be less prevalent in a sentence without a composition. Additionally, such approaches involve analyzing the hierarchy of syntactic roles, which can make a sentence more or less grammatical. Thus, the present study represents a new perception of the phenomenon of grammaticality of clauses with several wh-words and also of their interpretation for the Russian language, which was achieved by creating two experimental studies, taking into account the statistical analysis, depending on 3 parameters for studying single-pair and pair-list interpretations: the type of sentence (interrogatives / exclamatives), the presence/absence of a compositional union between wh-words, the order of wh-words in a sentence, - and one parameter for studying grammaticality: the position of the pronoun in in-situ. As a result, clauses with a wh-word in the in-situ position turned out to be semi-grammatical, and it was also found that interrogatives are more grammatical than exclamatives, and that clauses with a composition are more grammatical than clauses without a composition. At the same time, it was possible to fix that for clauses and their interpretations pair-list interpretations are prevailing for both interrogatives and exclamatives with single-pair and pair-list interpretations. This result indicates that native speakers of the Russian language tend to use pair-list interpretations with clauses with multiple wh-words. Moreover, the effect of the hierarchy of syntactic roles was insignificant for either interrogatives or exclamatives, regardless of the type of interpretation.