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Wh -in-situ and Wh -movement in Mandarin Chinese Wh questions

Li Zhen Email: zl912808@ohio.edu. Wh -in-situ and Wh -movement in Mandarin Chinese Wh questions. Introduction: Research Area. Chinese Wh Questions Wh-in-situ (no movement) Wh-movement. Aim/Justification.

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Wh -in-situ and Wh -movement in Mandarin Chinese Wh questions

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  1. Li Zhen Email: zl912808@ohio.edu Wh-in-situ and Wh-movement in Mandarin Chinese Wh questions

  2. Introduction: Research Area • Chinese Wh Questions • Wh-in-situ (no movement) • Wh-movement

  3. Aim/Justification • Previously, scholars do not agree with each other if there is movement in Wh questions. Generally, there are three schools: • Wh-movement • Wh-in-situ • Wh-movement/Wh-in-situ • This study is trying to figure out if there is movement (fronting) in Mandarin Wh questions, and the answer is yes, are there any patterns that we could follow.

  4. References • Soh, H. L. (2005). Wh -in-Situ in Mandarin Chinese. Linguistic Inquiry, 36(1), 143-155. • Lai-Shen Cheng, L., &  Rooryck, J. (2000). Licensing Wh-in-situ. Syntax, 3(1), 1-19. • Watanabe, A. (1992). Subjacency and S-structure movement of wh-in-situ. Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 1(3), 255 - 291. • C.-T. James Huang, Audrey Li and Yafei Li (2009). The Syntax of Chinese, Cambridge University Press • etc

  5. Research Questions • Is Madarin a Wh-fronting or in-situ language? • If there is movement of Wh-words/phrases, what are the syntactical conditions/patterns. • Which Wh-words/phrases are moveable (under certain conditions), which are not? • What do Chinese and other languages have in common in terms of the syntactical structure of Wh questions?

  6. Methodology • Data Sources: The Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC) by Tony McEnery and Richard Xiao, Lancaster University

  7. Methodology • Procedure: • 1. Collect and sample Wh-questions from the LCMC Corpus • 2. Analyze the syntactical structures of the Wh-questions • 3. Categorize the Wh-words/phrases by Determiner/Pronoun/Adverb (and maybe Negation as well)

  8. Methodology • Analysis • 1. With the data available, I hope it will be possible to identify which categories may have movement, and indentify the patterns for it. • 2. I also hope the data can allow me to compare the syntactical structure of Mandarin Wh-questions with those in other languages (English and Russian)

  9. Anticipated Problems/Limitations • My first and foremost concern is time. Since we have always been very busy, I am concerned that I will not have enough time to work on the reading/learning and analysis. • The LCMC corpus has one million words, but it contains only written text. In spoken discourse, there should be more freedom in Wh-movement .

  10. Expected Findings • My hypotheses • Mandarin does have Wh-movement (fronting) under certain conditions, so what are they? • Only some Wh-words/phrases can move. What are their characteristics? • What are the general patterns and parameters of Wh-questions’ syntactical structures of Mandarin and other languages have in common (especially English)

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