Syntactic Position And Feature Checking Of Chinese Wh-word Weishenme

In Chinese, the wh-word weishenme expressing reasons possesses some features that are different from other interrogatives. For example, it complies with the island condition (Huang 1982); It imposes strict restrictions on the verb of the main clause, for example it doesn't appear in the position of complements of control verbs and notional verbs (Tsai 1994b); a topicalized weishenme cannot have interpretation of clause, but wh-argument can; when operator elements such as quantifier or negative words appear before the interrogatives, weishenme has intervention effect, however, wh-argument usually doesn't have (Soh 2005). It is just because of these unique properties that make linguistists do many researches on the distinctiveness of Chinese weishenme, see Huang (1982), Lin (1992), Shi (1994), Tsai (1994), Hu (2002).In the earlier generative grammar, weishenme, as an adverbial wh-word, is posited to be an adjunct to VP or IP position just like any other adverbs (Huang 1982; Lasnik and Saito 1984). This traditional view is challenged recently by many linguists. Instead of adjoining it to VP or IP, it is argued that weishenme and other similar wh-words are base-generated in [Spec CP].This paper presents new evidence to defend for a syntactic account of weishenme in Chinese. It is argued that weishenme is base-generated in SpecCP and its wh-feature is checked in two ways: one is by Spec-Head Agreement if the local C head has a [+Q] feature, in this case no LF movement is involved and the island effect and intervention effect are attributed to other reasons; the other is by LF movement to matrix SpecCP to check feature with the nonlocal C with a default [+Q] feature if its local C has a [-Q] feature, in this case, weishenme will exhibit typical consequences of LF movement such as island effect and intervention effect.