On the apparent lack of multiple wh-questions in Indonesian

It has been claimed that Indonesian, like Italian, Irish and Tagalog, does not permit more than one wh-phrase in a question (Fortin 2009, Kurniawan 2013 a.o.). In this talk, I argue that the availability of multiple wh-questions should not be parameterised. Instead, what there is is a set of language-internal factors that conspire to make it impossible (or possible) to realise multiple wh-questions. Taking Indonesian as a case study, I claim that general interpretative constraints as well as language-specific structural constraints on question formation interact to block multiple wh-questions in many cases. However, in specific configurations where neither interpretative nor syntactic constraints hold, I show that that you can indeed ask a well-formed multiple wh-question in Indonesian. This finding drives us not only to re-evaluate the parameterisation of multiple wh-questions, but also, to re-examine the complete set of facts in the other languages that have been claimed to lack multiple wh-questions.