A QR Approach to In-situ Wh-adverb in Mandarin ChineseA QR Approach to In-situ Wh-adverb in Mandarin ChineseA QR Approach to In-situ Wh-adverb in Mandarin Chinese

• Main Authors: Ching-Hua Jean Wei, 魏菁華
• Other Authors: Dr. Tzong-Hong Jonah Lin
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/83104547736618178939

碩士 === 玄奘大學 === 應用外語系碩士班 === 99 === This thesis investigates the in-situ wh-adverb zenmeyang ‘how’ in Mandarin Chinese and the question of how it shows no island effects in certain syntactic contexts. We first review Tsai's (1994) proposal; he distinguishes wh-phrases into two types: the nominal wh-phrases, including the instrument (or means) zenmeyang 'how', which are interpreted via unselective binding of the question operator Q; and the non-nominal wh-phrases, including the reason wh-adverb weishenme 'why' and the manner zenmeyang 'how', which must move in LF, as they are operators and thus cannot be unselectively bound. We find that there are grammatical sentences where a manner zenmeyang 'how' occurs in a syntactic island, posing problems for Tsai's theory. It is this question that this thesis tries to solve. There are restrictions on the extraction of in-situ wh-adverbs in Mandarin Chinese sentences. Following the theory of Lin (2011), it is proposed that in Mandarin Chinese, Quantifier Raising (QR) is permitted in generic contexts. Generic NPs in English do not have inherent quantificational force and hence do not undergo QR; their quantificational properties are determined by the elements that occur with them in the same sentence (Carlson 1977, Diesing 1992). This work argues that the generic NPs in Mandarin Chinese, unlike those in English, have inherence quantificational force and thus can undergo QR when they assume the universal reading. The proposal of this thesis is that the wh-adverb zenmeyang 'how' can occur in a syntactic island only when it is contained in a generic NP. The generic NP undergoes QR and zenmeyang 'how' can then take a free ride to the initial A'-position of the sentence and receive an interpretation there; this is a pied-piping effect. On the other hand, if the sentence is episodic, the NP that contains zenmeyang 'how' cannot undergo QR, as it is not generic. This causes the sentence to be ungrammatical. If this QR-based analysis is correct, there is no need to make a distinction between the instrument (or means) zenmeyang 'how' and the manner zenmeyang 'how' because the interpretation of zenmeyang 'how' in fact depends crucially on the semantics of the verb that it modifies and the genericity of the sentence and the NP that contains it.