Anti-anti-homophony

Towards a syntactic account of “phonological” wh-cluster restrictions in Bulgarian

Abstract

It has often been claimed that clusters of wh-words in multiple whquestions in Slavic languages are subject to a ‘low-level PF constraint’ against sequences of homophonous wh-words. This article revisits this claim in light of data from Bulgarian. We show that there is a substantial class of exceptions to this anti-homophony constraint in Bulgarian, and we claim that the generalization is that the putative constraint holds of simplex wh-words but not complex or D-linked wh-phrases. We propose a fully syntactic account of this generalization, in which the anti-homophony effect comes about when a probe attempts to interact with two or more goals with exactly the same features, and this is ruled out by a general condition against such derivations (the Principle of Minimal Compliance).