A Comparative Study of Wh-in/ex-situ in English and Chinese

Abstract

Different languages have different types of the interrogative form. An interrogative sentence may be formed by an interrogative word or an interrogative morpheme on the verb. The displacement of the interrogative word is a phenomenon that can be found in many languages in the world. In this phenomenon, the interrogative words or phrases yield a special word order along with some crucial characteristics. There are three kinds of distributional option of the interrogative words in languages: at the beginning of the sentence, at the original grammatical position in the sentence, or in the middle.

By comparing the syntactic properties of English and Chinese interrogative words. we can find that the distributional options of the interrogative words in these languages are not the same. In Chomsky (1977, 1992), it was claimed that the difference of the interrogative words between languages can be characterized by some kind of internal form, which represents the logical derivation of the various interrogative words in languages. Huang (1982a, b) extends his idea into Chinese, such that the question word in the Chinese interrogatives does not undergo an overt movement, but is subject to a movement at the logical form (LF) level, where the wh-in-situ phrase is moved to an appropriate clause peripheral position (e,g, Spec of CP) in the sense of Rizzi (1997), which is a way similar to the overt wh-movement in English. The Chinese interrogatives have, however, been focused on the date of the so-called wh-in-situ phrases, which move eventually to make the [Operator-Variable] formation at LF. Even though Huang (1982) is the first major scholar who brought up the wh-in-situ languages within the generative syntactic framework, he did not in details observe the interrogative words in Chinese that can also be moved to the beginning of the sentence in the overt syntax. Since then, Chinese interrogative sentences have been one of the active research topics in Chinese formal grammar. Tsai (1994) classified the interrogative words of Chinese into the nominal and non-nominal ones, such that the overt wh-movement applies obligatorily to the non-nominal ones. Cheng (1991) identified the overt movement of the interrogative words in Chinese as a type of cleft construction. Pan (2014) further divided the Chinese wh-ex-situ sentences into four different constructions, depending of the possibility of extraction and base generation of the interrogative phrases. Unlike the interrogatives in English, those in Chinese are still controversial in characterizing the wh-in/ex-situ phrases. This thesis examines the previous analyses of the interrogatives in Chinese; Huang (1982), Cheng (1991), Tsai (1994), and Pan (2014), focusing on the distinction between the nominal versus non-nominal wh-phrases, between the extraction versus the base-generation analyses of the wh-ex-situ phrases, and between the focus versus the topic interpretation This thesis basically follows Wu (1999) and claims that the wh-fronting in Chinese should be treated as a case of topicalization, by providing evidence that the landing site of the wh-ex-situ phrases in Chinese exhibits the interpretation of topicalization relevant to the propoperties of topicalization in general.