Department of Linguistics

Whether and if can both introduce embedded questions, and appear to be interchangeable (e.g. I don’t know whether/if Amira will arrive). But a well-known difference between them is that the phrase or not can immediately follow whether (I don’t know whether or not Amira will arrive), but not if (*I don’t know if or not Amira will arrive) (Kayne 1991). I argue that this contrast can be explained if we assume that whether can pied-pipe (i.e. as whether undergoes wh-movement, it brings along the disjunction phrase), but there is no pied-piping in if-questions. I show that once the pied-piping parse for whether is eliminated for independent reasons, it behaves like if. I extend this analysis of whether to neither and their counterparts in other languages, and show that languages vary in a systematic way: the ability of whether to pied-pipe is directly correlated with whether the language allows its wh-phrases to pied-pipe more generally. Furthermore, languages like Polish can teach us something that we otherwise wouldn’t know just by studying English whether: ‘whether’ can pied-pipe due to an agreement relation it has with the disjunction
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