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When Wh-questions Interact With Information Structure:
Mapping from Discourse to Syntax| old_uid | 13542 |
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| title | When Wh-questions Interact With Information Structure:
Mapping from Discourse to Syntax |
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| start_date | 2014/03/06 |
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| schedule | 11h-13h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | In this talk I debate an issue concerning the so-called wh-ex-situ phenomenon in Mandarin Chinese.Two existing analyses will be introduced: the topicalization analysis (Tang 1988, Wu 1999) and the focalization analysis (Cheung 2008). In fact, the constructions discussed in the previous works reveal only a partial picture of a more general phenomenon. Concretely, I will show that there are four different types of wh-ex-situ in Mandarin: Type I: extracted wh-topic, Type II: extracted wh-focus, Type III: base-generated wh-topic and Type IV: base-generated wh-focus. Tang (1988) and Wu (1999) treat only Type I; Cheung (2008) reduces Type I to Type II and denies the existence of Type III. Type IV has not been discussed in the previous studies. All of these four types of structure exist in Mandarin and they behave differently both in syntax and in semantics. For instance, Type I and Type II obey locality constraints and "episodic eventuality constraints" while Type II and Type IV do not; Type I and Type III demonstrate the crucial properties of topics, such as D-linking effects. However, all of the above four types obey general semantic constraint on interrogatives. My claim is that these four types should not be analyzed in a unified way. Based on the recent work of the Split-CP architecture in Chinese, I will show that the ex-situ wh-phrase occupies the different positions in Types I & III (TopP) on the one hand, and in Types II & IV (FocusP) on the other hand. TopP is higher than FocusP when they co-occur. |
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| responsibles | Fernandez-Vest |
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