The Intervention Effect in Late Archaic Chinese and Modern Mandarin

I investigate the Intervention Effect in Late Archaic Chinese (LAC) and modern Mandarin. In LAC, negation displays the Intervention Effect on wh-phrases. There are two types of wh-items that are subject to the Intervention Effect triggered by negation, namely, wh-arguments and wh-adverbials that are supposed to move to a lower focus position below the negation; and those that have the option to stay in situ. Due to the intervening negative barrier, these c-commanded wh-phrases have to rise to a higher focus position above the negation so as to circumvent the Intervention Effect. I propose that the Intervention Effect in LAC is a consequence of Q-binding as a feature movement of [wh], interacting with movement into the hierarchy of clause-internal positions driven by [Topic] or [Focus] features. By contrast, focus or quantificational phrases do not display the Intervention Effect in LAC. In modern Mandarin, focus phrases, but not negation or quantified structures, impose the Intervention Effect on wh-items; negation, but not focus phrases or quantified structures, imposes the Intervention Effect on temporal wh-adverbials. I also propound three obligatory requirements for the Intervention Effect to take place in LAC, namely, interrogativity of wh-items, the possibility of feature wh-movement, and a hierarchy of clausal positions. Although the Intervention Effect in LAC and modern Mandarin are triggered by different barriers, it always needs to meet the three requirements. Data from both LAC and Mandarin justify previous analyses regarding feature movement.

Typology and Feature Checking of Wh-Questions

From the perspective of the syntactic behavior of wh-questions, natural languages can be classified into four types: Null Spec Language, Single Filled Spec Language, Multiply Filled Spec Language and Non-Multiply Filled Spec Language. Data were collected according to the relevance to the present research from each representative of the four types of languages, namely, Chinese, English, Bulgarian and Czech. Some of the data in the thesis were taken from the previous literature. Others were from self-introspection. The collected data were analyzed from the point of typology and feature checking. Feature checking in wh-questions of these four types of languages seem to be operated quite differently. Pied-piping of the formal features of the wh-words or wh-phrases occur in English, Bulgarian and Czech but not in Chinese. However, feature movement in wh-questions of these four types of languages is universal. This finding proves Chomsky’s biological linguistic belief that language is mainly an optimal solution to conditions it must satisfy.

A phase-based approach to Scandinavian definiteness marking

We propose a syntactic approach to apparent blocking effects in the realization of definiteness marking in the Scandinavian languages. The claim is that the differences in definiteness marking can be attributed to a requirement that a definiteness feature ([DEF], a property of N) must be located at the left edge of the DP phase in order to be PIC-accessible for probes outside of the DP. As a result, [DEF] can be spelled out on N if N is the only element within DP and [DEF] is therefore part of DP’s edge domain (giving rise to suffixal marking). In contrast, the presence of an (overt) adjectival modifier (at the left edge of DP) requires feature movement of [DEF] to D, which is then realized as a prenominal article (with additional spell-out of the lower copy of [DEF] in Swedish). The paper also addresses the (slightly different) behavior of definiteness marking in the context of relative clauses and certain issues pertaining to the interpretation of the different strategies.