Reverse Long-distance Dependency and Functional Uncertainty - The Interpretation of Mandarin Questions
Year: 1993
Type: article
Abstract: Mandarin Chinese WH-questions exhibit two syntactically interesting characteristics. First, WH-words that bear interrogative information always occur in situ. Second, in spite the above fact, I find that Mandarin WH-questions, with bounded WH-words, share the grammatical behaviors common to questions with unbounded and dislocated WH-words in other languages. Hence, intuitively, an account of Mandarin WH-questions should involve mechanisms for unbounded dependencies but, crucially, involve no unbounded syntactic manipulation. Accordingly, I propose an interpretative mechanism for Mandarin WH-questions based on the
Author: Chu‐Ren Huang
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1565710943