<i>Wh</i>-in-Situ Does Not Correlate with <i>Wh</i>-Indefinites or Question Particles

Bruening, Benjamin

doi:10.1162/ling.2007.38.1.139

Cited by 46 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…The claim that archaic Chinese wh-words were indefinites but were still required to undergo movement seems to be a blatant violation of the Clausal Typing Hypothesis (Cheng 1991), which proposes that a language forms wh-questions either through movement or by insertion of an operator in the CP layer but not by both means simultaneously. Interestingly, the purported correlation between wh-in-situ and the non-quantificational nature of wh-words has been brought into question recently by Haspelmath (1997) and Bruening (2007), who show that there are numerous languages with both wh-movement and wh-indefinites. The contribution that this paper hopes to make to this debate is to suggest that, at least for archaic Chinese, moved wh-words are still indefinites if the movement does not reach the interrogative scope position.…”

Section: Wh-indefinitesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Clause-internal wh-movement in Archaic Chinese

Aldridge

2010

J East Asian Linguist

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This paper proposes an analysis of wh-movement in late archaic Chinese as clause-internal focus fronting to the edge of vP. The paper further shows that archaic Chinese wh-words were indefinites, as in modern Chinese, and that their interpretation was obtained in the c-command domain of an appropriate trigger, a base-generated operator in [Spec, CP] in the case of wh-questions. The non-quantificational status of wh-words accords well with the short movement analysis since this movement did not serve to place the wh-word in the interrogative scope position in the left periphery of the clause. In this way, the paper also offers a contribution to the growing debate concerning the relationship between wh-movement and the status of wh-words as operators or indefinites. The conclusion here is that movement of wh-indefinites is not unexpected if the landing site is lower than the interrogative scope position.These facts pose interesting questions regarding the nature of wh-questions in archaic Chinese and the changes which have taken place in the historical development of Chinese. At first blush, it might appear that archaic Chinese wh-questions were of a substantively different nature from modern Chinese wh-questions. One might try to claim that archaic Chinese wh-words were quantificational operators and underwent the usual type of wh-movement to the interrogative scope position in the left periphery of the clause. The fact that they follow the subject in surface order would not be a problem if the subject could be analyzed as a topic, as proposed by Watanabe (2002Watanabe ( , 2005 for a similar type of wh-movement in old Japanese. Under this type of analysis, two changes would need to be accounted for: the loss of the strong feature driving wh-movement and the lexical change in wh-words from operators to indefinites.In this paper, however, I show that archaic Chinese wh-movement did not target the scope position in the C domain. Rather, this was short movement to a clausemedial position, similar to that proposed by

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Section: Wh-indefinitesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Clause-internal wh-movement in Archaic Chinese

Aldridge

2010

J East Asian Linguist

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“…For recent works challengingCheng's (1991) Clausal Typing Hypothesis, cf Bruening (2007). andBruening & Tran (2006).…”

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confidence: 99%

Why particles are not particular: Sentence‐final particles in Chinese as heads of a split CP

Paul

2014

Studia Linguistica

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International audienceBiberauer, Newton & Sheehan (2009) claim that clause-final particles are categorially deficient. This move is motivated by the fact that a number of VO languages-among them Mandarin Chinese-display sentence-final particles (SFPs), which, when analysed as complementisers, violate the purportedly universal Final-over-Final Constraint (FOFC). The FOFC excludes structures where a head-final projection dominates a head-initial one. In contrast, the present article argues that SFPs in Chinese instantiate C in a three-layered split CP a la Rizzi (1997, 2004) and hence are " visible " for the FOFC. Furthermore, to equate The World Atlas of Language Structures' (WALS) label adverbial subordinator with complementiser as Biberauer et al. (2008, 2009) do is shown to be problematic, given that it turns out to be a cover term for different categories. Accordingly, WALS' results for the distribution of adverbial subor-dinator cannot be mechanically used as testing ground for the predictions made by the FOFC for the category C

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“…Feasibility, however, demands that I trust published sources and naively take what these label as "infinitives", "converbs", and "action nominals" as my prime candidates for non-finite sources of EN-FIs. A survey based on Cheng 1991, Haspelmath 1997, Bhat 2000, and Bruening 2007 From our discussion in Section 2 we already know that Dutch, Latin, Lithuanian, Russian, and Slovene are [%i=i], and we conjectured the same for Belorussian, Old Church Slavonic, and Ukrainian. 19 Let us thus begin with the indefinite/interrogative ambiguity.…”

Section: A Crosslinguistic Surveymentioning

confidence: 79%

More on the indefinite-interrogative affinity: The view from embedded non-finite interrogatives

Gärtner¹

2009

Linguistic Typology

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German disallows embedded infinitival (wh-)interrogatives. Although crosslinguistic comparison has not been undertaken to any broader extent, most accounts attribute this gap to properties of complementizers and the C-system. By contrast, this gap will here be linked to a correlation between non-finite (wh-)interrogatives and the indefinite-interrogative affinity present in the inventory of wh-pronouns of many languages. The claim will be defended that, if a language has embedded non-finite (wh-)interrogatives, then its pronominal system does not have a robust indefinite/interrogative ambiguity. In addition to a crosslinguistic survey, it will be sketched -with particular reference to German -how to relate these two domains in terms of clausal typing and the illocutionary force of non-finite (root) interrogatives.

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Wh-in-Situ Does Not Correlate with Wh-Indefinites or Question Particles

Cited by 46 publications

References 25 publications

Clause-internal wh-movement in Archaic Chinese

Clause-internal wh-movement in Archaic Chinese

Why particles are not particular: Sentence‐final particles in Chinese as heads of a split CP

More on the indefinite-interrogative affinity: The view from embedded non-finite interrogatives

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