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Part of
Semantics in Language Acquisition
Edited by Kristen Syrett and Sudha Arunachalam
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 24] 2018
► pp. 250–274

Chapter 11
The meaning of question words in statements in child Mandarin

| Macquarie University
| Tsinghua University

This paper reports the findings of three experiments investigating children’s emerging knowledge of the semantics of information-seeking questions and declarative statements in Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin is particularly revealing about the semantic relationship between questions and statements, because it is a wh-in-situ language where question words appear in the same surface syntactic position in both questions and statements. The non-interrogative meanings that Mandarin-speaking children assign to question words lend weight to a unified approach to the semantics of existential expressions, including Free Choice Expressions, Negative Polarity Items, and disjunction words. When Mandarin question words appear in statements, children interpret them to be the semantic equivalents of existential expressions. The findings, therefore, support the unified approach to the semantics of existential expressions.

Keywords: questions, statements, existential expressions, English, Mandarin Chinese, child language acquisition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Non-interrogative uses of question words in English
  • 3. Wh-questions are derived from existential structures
  • 4. Wh-questions are semantically equivalent to existential statements
  • 5.Two analyses of polarity sensitive expressions
  • 6.The conjunctive/universal interpretation of ∃-expressions
  • 7.Question words in Mandarin
  • 8.The basic meaning of mandarin question words
  • 9.Experiment 1: Question words as existential expressions
  • 10.Experiment 2: Question words in the antecedent of conditionals
  • 11.Experiment 3: Question words license conjunctive/universal inferences
  • 12.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 2 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.24.11ste
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