Richards (2010, 2016) suggests that a language’s choice between the wh-movement option and the wh-in-situ option is made on the basis of language-specific prosodic properties that determine whether or not a prosodic wh-domain containing both the interrogative C and the wh-phrase can be established. A wh-domain in this sense roughly corresponds to a piece of prosodic structure in which these two key elements are separated by as few prosodic boundaries as possible, ideally zero. Prosodic boundaries demarcate structural units of the sentence, known as Minor or Intermediate Phrases (henceforth MiPs) that may trivially or nontrivially correspond to syntactic constituents (cf. Nespor and Vogel 1986, Selkirk 1986, 2011, Truckenbrodt 1995, Wagner 2005, among others). Richards proposes the following algorithm for constructing larger MiPs in wh-questions (see also Szendrői 2001, 2003):
Richards further claims that directionality of...