Yesno questions in Mandarin and the theory of focus

Abstract

Yes-no questions in Mandarin can be expressed in many different ways. Former syntactic approaches (Li and Thompson 1979; Huang 1991; Li 1992; McCawley 1994) stressed the difference between so called A-not-A question forms and the particle question with ma. With a number of pragmatic and syntactic tests like focusing, wh binding, and the interaction between negation and the universal quantifier dou, we show that a threefold distinction is necessary. In order to account for the data, we have to distinguish between (1) V-neg-V questions, formed with a reduplication of the main verb, (2) C-neg-C questions with the morpheme shi-bu-shi, and (3) particle questions with ma. In a second step we argue that a syntactic model of focus in the sense of Drubig (1994), Kiss (1995), and Kenesei (1998) can account for the syntactic properties of the different forms. We will analyze the V-neg-V form as head of a functional category Poll (polarity) situated directly above the VP. The C-neg-C form will be analyzed as head of Pol2, which is part of the C-projection, and ma as head of a defective category ST (sentence type), which lacks a specifier position.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.