Mandarin overt wh-fronting as focus movement

• Published in: Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America Vol. 8; no. 1; p. 5491
• Main Author: Ren, Fangning
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 27.04.2023
• ISSN: 2473-8689; 2473-8689
• DOI: 10.3765/plsa.v8i1.5491

This study reexamines the syntactic encoding of information structure embodied by Mandarin overt wh-fronting questions. The sentence patterns that this paper is concerned with are wh-questions containing one or more fronted wh-phrases surfacing in (i) a clause-initial position (in root or non-root contexts) or (ii) a position immediately following a topicalized subject (also in root or non-root contexts). Departing from previous literature that obscures the exhaustifying effect exerted by a clause-initial shi ‘be’, I propose a more fine-grained classification of the focus interpretations of this type of question: a bare wh-fronting question coerces a plain (non-exhaustive) contrastive focus or a mirative focus reading (when the wh-phrase is prosodically marked) of the wh-variable, and shi-marked wh-fronting questions are shown to enforce an exhaustive focus in the answer. These three types of focus-associated interpretations are treated as conventional implicatures following Bianchi et al. (2015).