Final Proposal, Ling 620, Li Zhen
LING 620 Research Methods Final Proposal Guidelines
FORMAT: Double-spaced, 12pt Times
LENGTH: 2000 words minimum
DUE;
Wednesday November 18 by midnight
Use these headings in your final submission
1. INTRODUCTION: RESEARCH AREA
a. Description of the topic area
It seems to be a widely accepted fact that Mandarin Chinese (hereafter MC) is a
Wh-in-situ (a Wh-word/phrase (also known as interrogatives) remains in the position
where it receives theta/thematic role) language. As discussed by Carnie (2006) in his
book on syntax, Chinese appears to have no overt Wh-movement, and was described
to set the Wh-parameter at “covert”. However, if we check any Corpora or look at how
native speakers use them both in their writing and speech, we can easily find that some
Wh-words do move to the sentence initial position. As a native speaker, I found that
the movement is not compulsory and both versions (in-situ and fronting) are
grammatical. This phenomenon has been neglected by previous study. For example:
1) Lisi weishenme cizhi?
Lisi why
resign
Weishenme Lisi cizhi?
why
‘Why does/did Lisi resign?’
Lisi resign
‘Why does/did Lisi resign?’
b. Discuss key terms and concepts
Mandarin Chinese, Wh-in-situ, Wh-movement, Wh-fronting, Wh questions, Logical
Form vs. Phonetic Form
Wh-in-situ means the Wh-words do not undergo any movement, in other words, they
stay in the logical location, in forming a question.
Final Proposal, Ling 620, Li Zhen
Logical Form (LF) is the mental representation of a sentence, and Phonetic Form (PF)
is how the sentence is pronounced.
Other terms are self-explanatory.
c. Identify the problem you are trying to solve
I would like to try to identify what conditions Wh-movement requires in MC, and what
Wh-words can move to the sentence initial position. In addition, I would also like to
look for the common syntactic patterns of the Mandarin Chinese Wh movement may
have with other languages.
2. AIM/JUSTIFICATION
a. This paper will use Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC) to
collect data on the distribution of Wh-words at their Phonetic Form
level. And then I will study the sentence structure of Wh questions with
both Wh-in-situ and Wh-words raised to the sentence initial position, to
see if what conditions make the movement acceptable and what
conditions will block it. Finally, I would also like to try to compare the
Wh-fronting in Chinese with English and Russian.
b. This study is important for three reasons:
i. Major previous study, including Huang (1982), Aoun and Li
(1993), as well as Soh (2005) all took MC as Wh-in-situ as
granted and studied only the Logical Form (LF). Actually,
viewing LF as a linguistic level was even questioned by Chater
(2002). As discussed by Carnie (2006) the PF and LF are
Final Proposal, Ling 620, Li Zhen
“computed together” and together, they “represent the final
products of our computation”. (358) Despite that scholars have
different views on LF, we cannot only concentrate on LF level,
ignoring what is going on at the PF level, which may of more
importance.
ii. Unlike previous study used only data (sentences) created by the
researchers, I will use authentic data from for LCMC corpus for
my study to minimize the errors of my data.
iii. According to Christensen (1994), speakers of MC from
Mainland China find some usage of Taiwanese MC odd or even
ungrammatical, due to the long separation. As a native speaker
of MC from Mainland China, I found some data contain errors in
previous study (C.-T. James Huang, Y.-H. Audrey Li and Hooi
Ling Soh are all from Taiwan, since the transcription of their
names is unique in Taiwan), which decrease the credibility of
their study. The unique pattern of the Wh questions in MC by
the overwhelming majority users in Mainland China has been
ignored. My study will concentrate on the use of it, so does the
LCMC corpus.
3. LITERATURE REVIEW
James Huang is known as the first Chinese scholar in MC syntax, who worked
with Chomsky. In his doctoral dissertation (1982), as well as the section of Whquestions in his book on Chinese syntax in association with Y.-H. Li and Y. Li (2009),
Final Proposal, Ling 620, Li Zhen
he proposed that like English, Wh-words in MC also undergo covert movement, which
means they undergo movement in the Logical Form (LF), despite the fact that they are
in situ at the Phonetic Form (PF). Carnie (2006) also used Huang (1982)’s study to
illustrate that there is no overt Wh-movement in in-situ languages like Chinese and
Japanese. However, in order to keep a consistency of the movement theory, Carnie
(2006) introduced a solution to claim that there is covert movement at the LF level for
the in-situ languages. The following figure by Carnie (2006) (page 359) shows the
dichotomy of overt and covert movement:
Aoun and Li (1993) have very different point of view against Huang and Carnie in
Wh-movement in MC. They argued that Wh-words in MC do not necessarily undergo
movement in LF. In their study, they reviewed different conditions of Wh-movement
in LF level, and provided their evidence to show instead of the Wh-words undergoing
movement in MC, the question operator (Qu-operator) does according to “the various
island constraints regulating overt extraction”. Their hypothesis requires many more
research of different aspects, especially on “the nature of the Qu-operator and its
distribution”.
Final Proposal, Ling 620, Li Zhen
Soh (2005) studied the movement of Wh-phrases in MC and pointed out that
adverbial and nominal Wh-phrases showed different covert movement. Based on
previous theoretical studies and grammaticality judgment of both Wh and A-not-A (a
unique type of Yes/No question in MC) questions, she concluded that in MC, adverbial
Wh-phrases undergo covert feature movement, and nominal Wh-phrases undergo
covert phrasal movement.
Although these studies have different conclusions towards the Wh-movement issue
at LF level, they have some similar shortcomings:
1.
They only concentrated the LF level, and ignored the fact that in some
Wh questions, Wh-words do have overt movement at the PF level. As
discussed by Carnie (2006) the PF and LF are “computed together” and
together, they “represent the final products of our computation”. We cannot
only concentrate on one level, ignore what is going on at the other level. Let us
use the examples that Soh (2005) studied in her research to illustrate. For
example:
Lisi weishenme cizhi?
Weishenme Lisi cizhi?
Lisi why
why
resign
‘Why does/did Lisi resign?’
Lisi resign
‘Why does/did Lisi resign?’
Here we can see that although the adverbial Wh-word (why in this case), can
appear in different positions in both MC sentences, it will not affect the
grammaticality of the sentences. In other words, both of the sentences are
grammatical.
However, in another example, it will be completely different.
a.*Meiyouren weishenme cizhi?
Final Proposal, Ling 620, Li Zhen
nobody
why
resign
‘Why did/does nobody resign?’
b. Weishenme meiyouren cizhi?
why
nobody
resign
‘Why did/does nobody resign?’
The sentence in 2) a is ungrammatical in MC. However, when the Wh-word
(why in this case) is moved to the sentence initial position, the sentence
became grammatical.
2.
Unlike the examples used in Carnie’s book on syntax, most other
researchers’ works lacked consistency in their data. Although all of them
claimed they are studying MC, they failed to provide authentic data. My
hypothesis is that most of these scholars lack strict training in MC as a native
language, since they are uniformly from Taiwan.
In conclusion, all the previous researches took the notion that Chinese is an in-situ
language for granted, and concentrated only on the Wh-movement at LF level. As the
result, they studied only one side of the coin. The other side could be even more
colorful and challenging, and waiting for research. My paper will explore the pattern of
overt Wh-movement in MC at PF level.
4. RESEARCH QUESTIONS/HYPOTHESES
a. Does Wh-movement allowed in MC, a Wh-in-situ language?
b. If there is movement of Wh-words/phrases, what are the syntactical
conditions/patterns, that will allow/block the movement?
Final Proposal, Ling 620, Li Zhen
c. Which Wh-words/phrases are moveable (under certain conditions),
which are not? From my initial study, the LCMC corpus data show that
adverbial Why (weisheme) is very flexible in MC. Roughly, one third
tokens appear at sentence initial position, and two thirds in-situ.
d. What do Chinese and other languages have in common in terms of the
syntactical structure of Wh questions?
5. METHODOLOGY
a. SUBJECTS/SOURCES
i. I will use LCMC corpus to collect authentic data for my study.
(web: http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/query-zh.html) Research
instruments (like Concordancer) are available online, so no other
tools are required at local computer.
ii. I will conduct an exclusive search for the all Wh-words and
select/categorize the useable data manually.
iii. To increase credibility of my study, I may include other native
speaker(s) to check my search result.
b. MATERIALS/INSTRUMENTS
i. Since Chinese is a pro-drop language (subject of a sentence is
omitted), it will make the position of Wh-words unidentifiable. I
have to select them manually to exclude these Wh questions.
ii. The Wh questions without subject can also be used in my study.
I can provide these sentences and ask 3 to 5 native speakers
Final Proposal, Ling 620, Li Zhen
(with no linguistic knowledge) to expand them into a complete
form to check if they confirm with the complete sentences I find
in the corpus.
c. PROCEDURE
By searching the Wh-words, the system will list all sentences. In
the search criteria, I can specify to display the complete sentence.
With the search result, I will first select sentences with Wh-words
in an identifiable position and categorize them into two groups: insitu and movement.
With the pro-dropped sentences, I will use them as a sentence
completion test to check if the test show similar pattern with the
search result of the non-pro-dropped sentences.
d. TYPE OF DATA
I am looking forward to get both Quan and Qual data.
Quan data are sample Wh questions. I will study their syntactic
structures with individual Wh-word.
Qual data are statistics of tokens of Wh-in-situ vs. Wh-movement,
which may show a preference by the native speakers of MC.
6. ANALYSIS
I will study their syntactic structures with individual Wh-word. After this, I will
categorize the Chinese Wh-words/phrases by Determiner/Pronoun/Adverb (and maybe
Final Proposal, Ling 620, Li Zhen
Negation as well). Then I will draw syntax trees and make different comparisons of the
structures: Wh-in-situ vs. Wh-movement, fronting vs. in-situ in optional Whmovement in groups.
Finally, I will compare the Chinese Wh questions with other languages.
7. ANTICIPATED PROBLEMS/LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY
The LCMC has one million words of the MC used in Mainland China. It has a
diversified data source of written language. However, I found it still limited. 1) it is
old, the corpus data was collected from text in ±2 years of 1991, 2) it does not have
spoken data, which may show more diversity/flexibility of Wh-words. I am considering
including additional corpus for my study.
The number of the native speakers in sentence completion test is limited.
8. WHAT DO YOU EXPECT TO FIND?/ OR RESEARCH FINDINGS SO FAR (50pts.)
a. Mandarin does allow Wh-movement (fronting) under certain conditions,
so what are they: tense, negation, etc? I hope I can find some in my
study.
b. Only some Wh-words/phrases can move. My hypothesis is that
adverbial Wh-words can. From my findings so far, adverbial Why is
flexible in its position.
c. What are the general patterns and parameters of Wh-questions’
syntactical structures of Mandarin and other languages have in common
(especially English).
Final Proposal, Ling 620, Li Zhen
9. CONCLUSION
The history of study of MC syntax is very young, and a lot of issues require study.
Wh question in MC is an interesting topic, and it attracts many scholars attention.
However, previous study only looked at it as a Wh-in-situ language, and argued with
different views at its LF level. The PF level shows a diversity/flexibility of Wh-words
distribution and needs study.
Current study published in English is carried out mostly by scholars from Taiwan.
Despite that they claim their study is about MC, they failed to build their research on
the data of Mainland MC, which is used by the largest number of people.
I will conduct my study with the data of MC used only in Mainland China to
illustrate that some Wh questions in MC allows movement of certain Wh-words, and
try to explore the conditions/rules for the Wh-movement in MC. I hope I can also find
native speakers preference with the help of corpus data and the sentence completion
test.
I would also try to compare Wh-movement in MC with other languages like
English and Russian to find their common features. I hope this would be helpful in
nonlinguistic fields like machine translation.
10. REFERENCES
Aoun, J. & Li, Y. (1993). Wh-elements in Situ: Syntax or LF? Linguistic Inquiry,
24(2), 199-238.
Carnie, A. (2006). Syntax, A generative introduction(2nd ed.). Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishing.
Final Proposal, Ling 620, Li Zhen
Chater, N. (2002). Is LF really a linguistic level? Behavioral and Brain Sciences,
25(6), 680-680.
Christensen, M. (1994). Variation in Spoken and Written Mandarin Narrative
Discourse. Ph.D. thesis, Ohio State University, Columbus.
Huang, C. T. (1982). Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar.
Doctoral dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
Huang, C. T., Li,Y. H., & Li, Y. (2009). QuestionsThesyntax of Chinese(pp. 236282).Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Soh, H. L. (2005). Wh-in-situ in Mandarin Chinese.Linguistic Inquiry, 36(1), 143155.
11. FORMAT (10pts)
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Is your paper 2000 words or more? 2037 words.
Have you edited/proofread your paper? Yes.
Is it free of typos, wrong spellings, etc? Yes.
Correct and Standardized Referencing according to APA