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Article published In:
Language and Linguistics
Vol. 19:2 (2018) ► pp.266–305

Fragment questions in Mandarin Chinese

Topic movement and pied-piping

| National Kaohsiung Normal University

This paper argues that fragment question (FQ) in Mandarin Chinese is derived from topic movement and TP deletion, contributing to the growing body of evidence that sentence fragments are syntactically full clauses (Merchant 2004). Structurally, an FQ consists of a topic-like constituent followed by a particle ne, which functions as a topic marker and as a constituent question particle simultaneously. The fragment is argued to move to the SpecTopP rather than SpecFocP (Wei 2013), because FQ exhibits topic properties and respects island effects such as the complex NP island and the adjunct island. However, it is insensitive to islands such as the sentential subject island and left branch condition. We propose that the absence of island effect can be attributed to the pied-piping of the entire topic-like island to the SpecTopP. In addition, the proposed analysis not only captures the ineligible FQs caused by intervention effect within the passive structures but also the eligible FQs induced by preposition drop in the language.

Keywords: fragment, question, topic movement, topicalization, ellipsis, pied-piping
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Distribution
  • 3.Topic movement and TP ellipsis
    • 3.1Connectivity effects
    • 3.2The structure of the fragment question
      • 3.2.1 Merchant’s (2004) analysis
      • 3.2.2FQ in SpecTopP, not in SpecFocP
    • 3.3The licensing of ellipsis in FQ
    • 3.4Dual functions of ne
  • 4.Evidence for topic movement
    • 4.1Idiom chunks
    • 4.2Island-(in)sensitivity
      • 4.2.1Merchant’s island effect
      • 4.2.2Chinese FQ and island effect
      • 4.2.3Chinese FQ and island repair effect in disguise: Pied-piping
      • 4.2.4FQ in passives
  • 5.Preposition drop
  • 6.Conclusion
    • 6.1Summary
    • 6.2Typological implication
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 15 April 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.00010.wei
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