The structure of multiple wh-questions differs significantly in the English and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language, firstly, with respect to the number of wh-phrases positioned at the beginning of the sentence and, secondly, with respect to the free vs. strict Superiority-obeying ordering of these wh-phrases.
The gist of this article is the contrastive syntactic analysis of multiple wh-questions in two aforementioned languages in the theoretical framework of Minimalist program in generative grammar. Our main argument is that these questions should be analyzed as CP projections in both languages, contrary to some previous findings, namely Bošković's (1997, 1998) analysis of these questions, in which the author maintains that null-C wh-questions in Bosnian/Croatian/ Serbian are analyzed as simple AgrsP projections.
The analysis of multiple wh-questions in English is based on the underlying assumption that only one wh-phrase moves into the vicinity of the complementiser C in order to check its uninterpretable WH feature. The uninterpretable feature of C [uWh] having been checked and deleted, every other movement of wh-phrases is prevented by the principle of economy. On the other hand, the analysis of multiple wh-questions in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian rests on the assumption that wh-phrases in this language have uninterpretable focus feature [uFoc], besides interpretable interrogative feature [iWh], which triggers their movement into the checking domain of Focus head, i.e. FP, the projection positioned between CP and TP. Apart from focus movement, one wh-phrase obligatorily moves to spec-CP to check the uninterpretable wh-feature of C.
Keywords: a multiple word questions, wh-phrases, wh-movement, the focus shifts, the superiority requirement, [WH] and [Foc] feature
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