Structural Adjacency and the Typology of Interrogative Interpretations

I point out that the generally accepted theory of single-pair versus pair-list readings for multiple wh-questions in the Slavic family, as instantiated in Bošković 2001a, predicts the wrong result for Russian multiple wh-questions and for coordinated multiple wh-questions in several languages. I suggest a reformulation of the connection between the structure and the interpretation of multiple wh-questions that relies on the structural adjacency of two or more wh-items at LF, and I discuss a number of cases in which this reformulation appears to make the right predictions for multiple wh-questions containing clitics.