Wh‐Expressions in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Wh-expressions are typically used to form constituent questions in Indo-European languages by fronting them to the specifier position (SpecCP), leaving a co-indexed trace in the original extraction site. This chapter provides an overview of linguistic phenomena involving wh-expressions in Chinese as well as various theoretical proposals concerning those phenomena. It presents the major empirical data that have played a central role in the theorizing of wh-phrases in Chinese. The chapter reviews some current theories of Chinese wh-phrases. A brief comment is made about two properties that have been claimed to correlate with wh-in-situ languages such as Chinese – the use of question particles such as Mandarin Chinese ne and the use of wh-words as indefinites as in Chinese existential polarity wh-phrases (EPWs). The chapter ends with a discussion of issues worth further exploration in the future.

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