Titre | Wh-ex-situ in Mandarin Chinese: Mapping Between Information Structure and Split CP |
Publication Type | Article de revue |
Année de publication | 2014 |
Authors | Pan, Victor Junnan |
Journal | Linguistic Analysis |
Volume | 39 |
Issue | 3-4 |
Start Page | 371 |
Pagination | 413 |
Date de publication | 04/2015 |
Mots-clés | cleft focus, left periphery, Mandarin Chinese, topicalization, wh-ex-situ |
Abstract | This paper examines the so-called wh-ex-situ phenomenon in Mandarin Chinese. It shows that there are four different types of wh-ex-situ in the left-periphery of Mandarin: Type I: extracted wh-topic, Type II: extracted wh-focus, Type III: base-generated wh-topic and Type IV: base-generated wh-focus. This differs from preceding accounts which analyze all ex-situ wh-phrases either as topics (cf. Tang 1988, Wu 1999) or as foci (cf. Cheung 2008, 2014). These four types display different syntactic and semantic properties. While wh-topics (extracted and base-generated) must be D-linked and obey locality constraints as well as the “episodic eventuality” constraint (cf. Zhang 2002), ex-situ wh-foci do not. However, the four types all satisfy general semantic constraints on interrogatives. Within the split-CP architecture in Chinese, ex-situ wh-topics and ex-situ wh-foci occupy different positions, TopP being higher than FocP. |
Refereed Designation | Refereed |