Children’s Interpretation of Ambiguous wh-Adjuncts in Mandarin Chinese

Wh-variable Licensing in Mandarin Chinese

As is well-known, wh-phrases in Mandarin Chinese can be used as interrogative pronouns, existential indefinites, or universal quantifiers, and regardless of which interpretation they receive, they remain in-situ at S-Structure. In addition, it is not the case that these different usages are freely available in all contexts, as illustrated by the following examples. (1)ta mai sheme shu she buy w...

Quantifier Strengths Predict Scopal Possibilities of Mandarin Chinese Wh-indefinites

It is widely noted that quantifier scope in English is bounded by relative clauses, if -clauses, and perhaps tensed clauses in general. It is also well known that indefinite determiners such as a, some, and a certain are exempt from this restriction. We can try to explain this discrepancy in two ways. On one hand, maybe indefinite NPs take scope through a mechanism separate from (and more liber...

Bayesian Pronoun Interpretation in Mandarin Chinese

Kehler and Rohde (2013) proposed a Bayesian theory of pronoun interpretation where the influence of world knowledge emerges as effects on the prior and the influence of information structure as effects on the likelihood: P(referent|pronoun) μ P(pronoun|referent)P(referent). Here we present two experiments on Mandarin Chinese that allow us to test the generality of the theory for a language with...

ADVERBS IN MANDARIN WH - QUESTIONS Xin - xian

Syntax and Semantics of Complex and Ambiguous Wh-questions

In this paper, we present a new approach to the syntax and semantics of wh-questions. On the basis of an appropriate type hierarchy whose members model contributions of lexical items to sentence mood, we introduce a head-interrogative schema that licences wh-sentences syntactically and contributes the semantic interrogative operator. This syntactic basis allows the compositional construction of...