On Zenme 'How-come' in Mandarin Chinese: A Left Periphery Analysis

• Main Authors: CHEN, YAN-RUEI, 陳彥叡
• Other Authors: Yeh, Jui-chuan
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/87xnje

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 臺灣語言研究與教學研究所 === 106 === This thesis aims to map out the syntactic distribution of the wh-phrase zenme ‘how-come’ in Chinese under the cartographic approach. In this thesis, I focus on zenme which occurs in the CP domain. It has been observed that zenme in the pre- modal position can either serve as a question to ask the cause of an event (i.e., the causal zenme), or serve as a reply to deny the occurrence of an event (i.e., the denial zenme) (Tsai 1999, 2000, 2007, 2008). However, there are two more new usages of the wh-phrase zenme ‘how’ which both demonstrate even stronger illocutionary force than the denial zenme. One kind of zenme denotes a stronger degree of denial interpretation (hereafter the ‘strong denial or ‘s-denial’ for short) than that of denial zenme and thus the original denial zenme is henceforth viewed as the weak denial zenme (‘w-denial’ for short) in this thesis. Another usage of zenme denotes negative interpretation so as to negate the whole proposition that the sentence denotes. In this thesis, I investigate the four wh-phrase zenme's ‘how-come’: (1) the causal zenme, (2) the w-denial zenme, (3) the s-denial zenme, and (4) the negative zenme. Following Rizzi’s (1997, 1999) Split-CP hypothesis, I propose that the wh-phrase zenme ‘how-come’ in Chinese demonstrates a transparent mapping of syntax and semantics in line with Tsai (1994, 1999, 2000, 2007, 2008).