Absence of verb inversion and specificity in peninsular Spanish Wh-questions

This dissertation provides a unified account of the Absence of Verb Inversion and the presence thereof in Peninsular Spanish Wh-questions by studying the interaction between Wh-Operators and Affirmative/Negative Operators on the one hand and the interaction between Wh-Operators and partitive PPs that are specific on the other. The theoretical framework adopted here comes from Rizzi (1995, 1991), Chomsky (1993), Kiss (1993), and Laka (1990).;The dissertation consists of five chapters. In chapter one I supply background information on Verb Inversion in Peninsular Spanish. I show that there are two syntactic constructions that constitute a puzzle for our current understanding of Verb Inversion in Peninsular Spanish. These are Wh-questions in which absence of Verb Inversion yields grammatical sentences, contrary to expectation, i.e., questions with a Wh-Operator and an Affirmative/Negative Operator and questions with a Wh-Operator and a Prepositional Phrase that is specific. The central claim of chapter two is that Affirmative/Negative Operators are in a specifier/head configuration with the verb and that they occupy the specifier of Sigma Phrase. I show that Sigma Phrase is dominated by Focus Phrase and Topic Phrase and that SigmaP dominates Finite Phrase. In chapters three and four, I find that there is a relationship between Verbal Inversion and the feature (+/...