| As one of the major sentence types in Mandarin,questions serve the crucial function of inquiring and confirming information,gaining wide attention from Chinese linguists.Since Rizzi(1997)proposed the split-CP hypothesis,the study on Chinese questions has shifted its focus from in-situ interrogatives to ex-situ interrogatives.Chinese interrogatives can express the interrogative tone,as well as topic-or focus-feature in some contexts.However,different interrogatives are subject to different restrictions on semantics and pragmatics.Under the theoretical framework of the Cartographic Theory,this paper will explore the distribution of four major types of Chinese interrogatives in the left periphery to get a relatively complete depiction.Q-feature is considered as a major feature to differentiate questions from other sentence types.Chinese is apt to utilize syntactic methods to realize Q-feature apart from interrogative intonation.The interrogative constituents in four Chinese question types include particle ma,wh-words and constructions like the parallel structure conjoined by haishi and the A-not-A constituent,which must be located in Force Phrase so as to properly indicate the sentence type.The current study confirms Pan(2014)'s viewpoint by claiming that Chinese wh-interrogatives are preposed to check other functional features like topic and focus,subject to certain contexts.Besides,it also probes into the question whether multiple wh-phrases can coexist in the left periphery.Two and more wh-topics can exist simultaneously in the wh-fronting construction in conformity with Cheung(2013)'s distribution map of Chinese topics;more than one wh-focus can coexist as well,but in a unique syntactic slot.Therefore,this paper proposes a hierarchical structure introduced by SHI in Spec-FocP,with the initial wh-foci being its complement,and others adjoined rightwards one by one.As for the coexistence of wh-topics and wh-foci,wh-topics always appear higher than wh-foci in separate fields. |
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