出版物 ｜Sophia Linguistica
Masahiro Akiyama
Wh-the-hell questions (e.g. What the hell are you doing?) in English express bafflement or surprise from the viewpoint of the speaker or some other discourse participant. This paper explains the distribution of wh-the-hell expressions in English, focusing on and formally formulating the property of the hell as a marker of bafflement or surprise. It will be proposed that the hell is lexically assigned unvalued point-of-view (POV) features that must be valued according to the corresponding features assumed by a functional head (the POV-head), which is merged in a position higher than the landing site of wh-movement. This proposal makes it possible to account for the peculiarity of the distribution of wh-the- hell expressions in terms of the phase-impenetrability condition.
