Expansion and Closure: Towards a Theory of Wh-construals in Chinese.

摘要

This dissertation defends a Hamblin-semantics for the construals of wh-in-situ expressions in Chinese. It attempts to achieve three aims. The first aim concerns the problems facing LF movement approach and the Unselective Binding approach towards wh-construals. It is argued that though LF movement approach has difficulty in explaining island-escaping behavior of some wh-in-situ expressions and their association with only, the unselective binding approach is also not successful in leaving the wh-phrase in situ, because this treatment faces equally serious problems, mostly of semantic misinterpretations. The conclusion we reached is that we may need to take a different approach that combines the merits of both approaches: (1) keeps wh-phrases in-situ (predicting association with only and no island constraints); (2) but interpret them in non-in-situ position (getting semantics right).;The second aim of this dissertation is to develop a Hamblin-semantics for wh-construals in Chinese that can achieve the two merits. The working assumption made in this approach is that wh-phrases directly denote sets of alternatives, which is supported by some empirical evidence. The direct consequence from this assumption is that we need a so-called pointwise functional application, which has the effect of 'extracting' and interpreting wh-in-situ in a displaced position without resorting to covert movement. This effect is achieved by a process called expansion inherent in the definition of the pointwise functional application. It is an operation in semantics, insensitive to syntactic islands. If it is left unclosed, the expansion returns a set of propositions, that is, the denotation of questions. But this expansion may be closed by quantificational operators.;The third aim of this dissertation is to testify how this theory, namely expansion and closure, works for wh-construals in Chinese in a better way. Two wh-constructions are investigated: wh-questions and wulun-wh-dou constructions. For wh-questions, we will show how the pointwise functional application rule obtains wide-scope interpretations of interrogative wh-in-situ expressions across three typical island structures under the assumption that there is no movement. It achieves this result at no additional cost: just assuming wh-in-situ expressions denotes sets of individuals that can expand via a simple pointwise functional application rule. It is pointed out that though LF movement can also achieve correct semantics, our theory is advantageous over LF movement in several aspects.;The investigation of the wulun-wh-dou constructions is mainly concerned with the mechanism of closure. After investigating the syntax and semantics of wulun, it is proposed that the adverb wulun is a universal operator that universally closes the expansion of alternatives denoted or expanded by wh-phrases. If this is true, we are committed to treating dou (the most common matching item in the consequent clause) as a non-universal-quantificational element. Adopting the proposal on dou as an existential quantifier serving for skolemization, we provide a detailed characterization of the interaction between wulun and dou in both the nominal and sentential wulun-dou constructions. Several novel ideas are proposed for wulun-dou structures. One is that wulun-XP is base-generated within dou VP domain, the other is that wulun-wh is the instantiation for distributive quantification. The consequences of these ideas are discussed.