Abstract
Fragment questions (henceforth FQs) in Mandarin Chinese usually end up with the particle ne. In the literature (e.g. Wei 2013, 2016, 2018), Chinese ne is construed as functioning similarly to Koeran particle -yo and Chinese FQs are analyzed as a fronting-ellipsis phenomenon. Within the framework of Dynamic Syntax (Kempson et al. 2001; Cann et al. 2005), a parsing-based account of Chinese FQs is proposed, showing that (i) ne in Chinese FQs will trigger the REGENERATION process to re-use a macro of actions stored in the previous context; (ii) Semantically, Chinese FQs are often employed as queries about another relatively separate event in connection with the previous one; pragmatically, FQs shows speakers’ interest towards additional information.
7 Acknowledgment
We gratefully acknowledge funding support from Social Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China (Grant No. 21YYB015).
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© 2022 Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
Articles in the same Issue
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Articles in the same Issue
- Table of Contents
- EMCAT-POL: A catalogue of 817 basic emotion terms in Polish
- English and Chinese existential constructions in contrast: A corpus-based semantic study
- Discourse function of personal pronouns in a slavic pro-drop language: Evidence from Croatian L1 argumentative writing
- The intervention effect in suzhounese polar questions
- Imperfective aspect underspecified for number: Evidence from an eye-tracking during reading experiment
- Chronotopic identities in contemporary Chinese poetry calligraphy
- Final tensing and opacity in Podhale Goralian
- The diachronic evolution of posture verbs in Chinese
- Fragment questions in Chinese: At the syntax-pragmatics interface
- Book Review