WH-doublets in Hokkaido/Hakodate-Japanese

This paper will contribute to the linguistic theory by observing a hardly studied issue of reduplicated WH-words, or WH-doublets. Our purposes are: i) to describe the properties of interrogative WH-doublets, such as dare-dare ‘who-who’ or dogo-dogo ‘where-where’, in Hokkaido/Hakodate-Japanese in comparison to Tokyo-Japanese and Korean, and ii) to propose that the plurality of the variable in WH-doublets should be properly restricted so that the theory accounts for the properties of WH-doublets, namely it ranges over atomic individuals and i-sum, but not group. The present study is important on its own since WH-doublets have been considered to be non-existence in the literatures.