Summary Details
| Query: |
Topicalization of Wh-Phrases
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| Author: | Liang Chen | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Syntax
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| Summary: |
Dear all,
A couple of days ago, I posted an inquiry regarding crosslinguistic variation on the availability of syntactic wh-topicalization. Epstein (1992) attempts to account for the impossible wh-topicalization in English in terms of Economy Constraint. (1) a. Who said that John likes Mary? b. Who said that Mary, John likes? c. Who said that John likes who? d. * Who said that who John likes? However, it seems that the equivalent of (1d) in (2) is good. (2) shei shuo shei zhangsan hen xihuan who say who Zhangsan very like I raised the following three questions: (i) What is the case with other languages? (ii) How to account for the cross linguistic difference? (iii) Can the ungrammaticality of (1d) be accounted for in terms of information conflict between topic and wh-phrases? Although the responses are not overwhelming, they are really informative and stimulating. I am grateful to. Dr. Jeremy Whistle, Dr. Kleanthes K. Grohmann, Dr. Gereon Muller, Dr. Rudy Troike, Dr. Elisa Steinberg, Dr. Bart Mathias, an anonymous professor and the linguistlist staff. As always,I will post a follow up summary if I get any more information. The following is a short and hopefully intermediate summary. 1) The English fact is not clear. That is, some English speakers find (1b) and (1c) equally unacceptable. 2) The intuitive incompatibility between topicalizing a constituent (expressing ''old information'') and focussing the same thing (''new information'') might explain the ungrammaticality of the English examples (assuming there is a contrast between (1c) and (1d)). 3) The problem then remains how to rule in the Chinese sentences, as Wu (1999) provides ample evidence to show that a fronted WH is a topicalized WH in Chinese as in (2). 3) German is similar to English in that Wh-phrases cannot undergo topicalization. And Spanish seems to behave like Chinese. Dr. Gereon Muller argues that the process in question must be topicalization because topicalization in German triggers verb-second; scrambling does not. (That said, scrambling of wh-phrases is typically also not very well possible in German.) 4) It is not obvious to me whether topicalization in English is a semantically homogeneous phenomenon (see, e.g., Culicover's work). 5) It seems there is a gap between syntactic topicalization and semantic topicalization. 6)There might also be crosslinguistic variation on the topicalizability of quantified phrases. References: Cho, Sungeun and Xuan Zhou. 1999. ''The Interpretation of Wh-Elements in Conjoined Wh-Questions'' ms.SUNY Stony Brook. Muller, Gereon. and Wolfgang Sternefeld 1996. A-bar Chain Formation and Economy of Derivation. Linguistic Inquiry. Grohmann, Kleanthes K. 2000. Prolific Peripheries: A Radical View from the Left PhD dissertation. University of Maryland. http://www.punksinscience.org/kleanthes Tang, C.-C.Jane. 1988.''Wh-Topicalization in Chinese'' ms. Cornell University. Wu, Jianxin. 1996. ''Wh-Topic, Wh-Focus and Wh-in situ'' University of Maryland Working Papers. Wu, Jianxin. 1999. ''Syntax and Semantics of Quantification in Chinese'' PhD Dissertation. University of Maryland. [downloadable from the UMD web-site, http://ling.umd.edu , then go to the paper Archive] Liang Chen Department of Linguistics University of Connecticut Storrs, CT 06269-1145 |
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| LL Issue: | 12.2601 | |
| Date Posted: | 18-Oct-2001 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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