Syntactic doubling and the nature of wh-chains

This paper discusses cases of syntactic doubling in wh-dependencies attested in dialects
of Dutch, where more than one member of the same chain is spelled out. We
focus on cases of non-identical doubling, in which the chain links spelled out have
different forms. We demonstrate that the order of elements in a chain is fixed: the first
(or syntactically higher) one is less specific that the second one. We argue that this
generalization follows from partial copying, a process that copies a proper subconstituent
and remerges it higher in the structure. This naturally excludes the ungrammatical
orders, as these would involve full copying plus the addition of features,
in violation of the inclusiveness condition. The proposal requires pronouns to be
spell-outs of phrases, and it is in combination with this hypothesis that the full set of
data is accounted for in a uniform way. Advantages over alternative accounts of
syntactic doubling are discussed.