The Department of Linguistics presents a
Masters Thesis Defense by
Mengqi Wang
Thursday, May14th, 2015
2:30 PM in LNCO 2110
Evidence on Wh-head Movement of Mandarin Bare
Predicate Cleft
ABSTRACT
This thesis investigates the predicate cleft (PC) constructions in Mandarin Chinese where a verb (bare PC) or verb phrase
(full PC) undergo topicalization on top of a verum focus sentence. Cheng & Vicente (2013) conclude that the topicalized
verb and the lower verb in bare PC form a long head movement relation, discarding a remnant movement analysis fed by
vP-external scrambling (Badan:2007). However, to be complete, the argument also needs to consider vP-internal
scrambling observed by Soh (1998) and a selective deletion analysis (Fanselow & Ćavar, 2002; Nunes, 2004).
I show that vP-internal scrambling fails to derive a plausible remnant movement analysis, and a selective deletion analysis
also faces serious theoretical and empirical challenges. Long head movement is thus necessary to account for Mandarin
bare PC. Although this conclusion converges with cross-linguistic treatment of PC, I point out the unreliability of idiom
interpretation as a diagnostic for long head movement used in some studies (Landau:2006; Vicente:2007; Ott: 2010)
Moreover, I show that the doubling effect, an unresolved issue in Cheng & Vicente (2013), can be accounted for, if the
distinctiveness between an A'-chain and a verb-raising chain is taken seriously (Chomsky, 2008; Aboh & Dyakonova,
2009). In addition, for future study, I present the puzzling restriction on the types of category that can undergo piedpiping with the fronted verb.
The necessity of a long head movement analysis supports bare phrase structure, under which head-to-spec movement is
fully expected. In addition, it constitutes as an empirical argument against eliminating head movement (Chomsky, 2001).
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