Clausal pied-piping in Basque wh-questions and syntactic optionality

Basque embedded wh-questions exhibit apparent optionality between long-distance extraction of the wh-word and clausal pied-piping. This paper attempts to account for the pattern of free alternation found in Basque in a way that addresses the issue of syntactic optionality. It establishes a more comprehensive picture of the distribution of Basque clausal pied-piping in wh-questions, and shows that Cable’s QP-based analysis of pied-piping can account independently for several restrictions, while providing the possibility of syntactic optionality. The central theoretical claim here is that a Q-based analysis is compatible with a Minimalist approach to optionality of the sort pursued in Biberauer & Richards (2006).