27.1275, Diss: Chinese, Semantics, Syntax: Dawei Ji: 'The Semantics-Pragmatics Interface and Island Constraints in Chinese'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-1275. Mon Mar 14 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.1275, Diss: Chinese, Semantics, Syntax: Dawei Ji: 'The Semantics-Pragmatics Interface and Island Constraints in Chinese'

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Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2016 08:45:52
From: DAWEI JI [daweijin at buffalo.edu]
Subject: The Semantics-Pragmatics Interface and Island Constraints in Chinese

 
Institution: University at Buffalo 
Program: Department of Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2016 

Author: Dawei Ji

Dissertation Title: The Semantics-Pragmatics Interface and Island Constraints
in Chinese 

Dissertation URL:  http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~rchaves/dawei_dissertation.pdf

Linguistic Field(s): Semantics
                     Syntax

Subject Language(s): Chinese, Mandarin (cmn)


Dissertation Director(s):
Rui Pedro Chaves
Jean-Pierre Koenig
Matthew Synge Dryer
Robert van Valin

Dissertation Abstract:

This thesis is about strong island effects and intervention effects. Strong
island effects are contexts where operator-variable dependencies cannot be
established. The paradigmatic cases of strong island violations in Chinese
occur in why-questions. This thesis explores a basic contrast: why-questions
fail to be interpreted in strong island contexts, as opposed to  other
wh-questions. This contrast is illustrated in (1a) and (1b):

(1)   

a. #Ni  xiang   mai [ta weishenme xie] de  shu?
    You want.to  buy  he why  write  REL  book
  #‘Whyi do you want to buy the book [that he wrote ti]?’
b. Ni xiang   mai [ta yinwei  shenme  xie] de shu?
  You want.to  buy he because.of what   write REL book
  #‘What is the reasoni such that you want to buy the book that he 
  wrote for that reasoni?’

The main questions that my account of strong islands addresses are the
following: 
- Is it true that only why-questions induce strong island violations, while
others don’t? 
- If Chinese strong island violations are indeed tied to why-questions, what
is special about this question type that leads to strong island violations? 
- What is the nature of strong island violations in why-questions? Are they
syntactic, semantic, pragmatic or a combination? 

This thesis develops a semantic account for strong islands, and the core idea
can be summarized as follows. What sets apart the reason adverb why from other
wh-interrogative phrases is that why is ontologically different. Why modifies
propositions, relating a proposition to a set of reasons, rather than
corresponding to a part of the proposition. This proposition-level operation
exhibits a main clause phenomenon, meaning that a why-question should only
occur as a root clause (main clause). Based on this observation, I conclude
that no why-questions may be embedded. In this view, the island-creating
contexts cause interpretation problems simply because they are embedded
clauses. There is nothing special about these island domains per se. Indeed, I
provide evidence that a why-question cannot even embed as a complement clause.
This theory predicts that if we can find another type of question that
similarly modifies the proposition level, island effects should arise there,
too. In this thesis, I find one such example in A-not-A questions. I argue
that A-not-A questions are yes-no questions that relate a proposition to its
truth values. As predicted, island effects occur in A-not-A questions.  

Intervention effects arise when scope-taking elements linearly precede an
interrogative phrase. This constraint resembles strong island violations, in
that it also applies to why-questions and A-not-A questions, yet fails to
apply to other wh-questions. In this thesis, I show that intervention exhibits
variability: (i) monotone increasing quantifiers as well as non-monotonic
quantifiers do not obey the intervention constraint; (ii) conversely, monotone
decreasing quantifiers and focus-sensitive expressions are subject to the
constraint. Based on the proposal that why-questions and A-not-A questions
involve interrogative phrases that are proposition-level modifiers, my thesis
proposes that scope-taking elements that take precedence over the
interrogative phrases need to be topics. This proposal correctly predicts the
variability in intervention effects.




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