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Part of
Interfaces in Grammar
Edited by Jianhua Hu and Haihua Pan
[Language Faculty and Beyond 15] 2019
► pp. 133–166

Chapter 6
System repairing strategy at interface

Wh-in-situ in Mandarin Chinese

| The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Institut Universitaire de France, CNRS

Wh-words in Chinese are ambiguous in specific contexts. In actual conversational situations, when speakers put different combinations of stress with intonation on sentences, the relevant wh-words are no longer ambiguous. The encoded prosodic forms can be analyzed as phonological features in the feature bundles associated with a given lexical item in the Lexical Array. Since these prosodic features have semantic effects on the output of the computational system at the Conceptual-Intentional interface, they satisfy Legibility conditions and therefore, they do not violate the Inclusiveness condition. Prosodic marking is only activated as a last resort in cases where semantic ambiguity arises, which can be viewed as a system repairing strategy at interfaces in the sense of Reinhart (2006).

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Historical review of the problem
    • 1.2Main proposals
  • 2.Prosodic licensing of wh-in-situ in Chinese
    • 2.1General consideration
    • 2.2Underspecified wh-words
    • 2.3Licensing contexts
      • 2.3.1Unambiguous licensing contexts
      • 2.3.2Ambiguous licensing contexts
        • 2.3.2.1Prosodic licensing of wh-in-situ
        • 2.3.2.2∃ and Q readings
    • 2.4Arguments from wh-topicalization
  • 3.Theoretical consequences
    • 3.1The cases that the prosodic licensing does not look into
    • 3.2Last-resort status and interpretative redundancy
    • 3.3How is my analysis compatible with the previous ones?
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.15.06pan
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