ABSTRACT
Parasitic gaps appear relatively rarely in naturally occurring speech but have been widely influential in the development of syntactic theory concerning wh-movement, operator movement, and A-bar chains. A growing body of research on South Asian languages claims that languages traditionally considered to be wh-in-situ, such and Hindi-Urdu and Bangla, are instead languages with true wh-movement in the narrow syntax, though with particular word-order characteristics that sometimes obscure this fact (Simpson and Bhattacharya 2003; Manetta 2006, 2010, 2011; Malhotra and Chandra 2007; Simpson and Choudhury 2011; Bhattacharya and Simpson 2012). This chapter argues that Hindi-Urdu does indeed exhibit true parasitic gaps and compares their properties with PGs in the related wh-movement language Kashmiri. Following the argumentation for Japanese found in Abe and Nakao (2009) and Abe (2011), I show that that delicate testing reveals that in certain environments in which other strategies are unavailable, real PGs are evident. I claim that this then serves as additional evidence in favor of the wider wh-movement research program for Indic languages.
