Two experiments investigated the acceptability of multiple questions. As expected, sentences violating the Superiority Condition were accepted less often than sentences obeying it.The status of the Superiority violations was not improved by the addition of a third wh , regardless of whether the third wh was an adjunct or an argument, though it was improved by the addition of a second question (e.g., and when ).Further, in a small pilot study directly comparing a sentence with adjacent final wh -phrases that may induce a stress clash ( I'd like to know who hid it where when ) with a sentence violating Superiority but avoiding the final adjacent wh -phrases ( I'd like to know where who hid it when ), half the participants indicated that the Superiority violation sentence sounded better.This suggests that the status of some additional- wh sentences may appear to improve simply because the comparison sentence with adjacent final wh -phrases is degraded.Overall, the results of the studies suggest that there is no need to complicate syntactic theory to account for the additional- wh effect, because there is no general additional- wh effect.

This article proposes a new base generation account of free constituent order. Scrambling as movement is incompatible with central assumptions of the Minimalist Program:it cannot involve the checking of strong categorial features. Concentrating on German, the article refutes the standard empirical arguments for scrambling and shows that free constituent order is a base-generated phenomenon. The article proposes that °-role assignment is a by-product of checking the formal features of arguments. When checking features are strong, word order is fixed; when checking features are weak, free constituent order arises owing to a relativized interpretation of the Minimal Link Condition.