Reverse Long-distance Dependency and Functional Uncertainty - The Interpretation of Mandarin Questions

Abstract

Mandarin Chinese WH-questions exhibit two syntactically interesting characteristics. First, WH-words that bear interrogative information always occur in situ. Second, in spite the above fact, I find that Mandarin WH-questions, with bounded WH-words, share the grammatical behaviors common to questions with unbounded and dislocated WH-words in other languages. Hence, intuitively, an account of Mandarin WH-questions should involve mechanisms for unbounded dependencies but, crucially, involve no unbounded syntactic manipulation. Accordingly, I propose an interpretative mechanism for Mandarin WH-questions based on the

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