A Further Study of Interrogative Sentences in Chinese

Author: Ting-chi Tang

Abstract：

The present study consists of two parts. The first part deals with Li and Thompson's (1979) semantic principle and pragmatic constraint on A-not-A ques-tsion in Chinese, and the second part with analyses of direct and indirect questions in Chinese proposed by Y. Mochizuki (1980), R.L. Cheng (1982), J. Chen (1982) and C. T. Huang (1982). Our study points out that Li and Thompson's semantic principle and pragmatic constraint are conspicuously lacking in generality as well as independent evidence and thus can be replaced by constraints which are more general and plausible. Our study also points out that such attempts as made by Mochizuki and Chen to determine the scope of question words in Chinese by means of subcategorization and/or semantic features of complement-taking verbs fall short of both descriptive adequacy and explanatory adequacy, and presents an alternative analysis to Huang's analysis by making crucial use of logical forms and the rule "Move α ".

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