透過您的圖書館登入
IP:52.91.54.203
  • 學位論文

Wh-Dependency in Vietnamese and the Syntax of Wh-in-Situ

越南語疑問句結構與在位疑問詞之句法分析

指導教授 : 蔡維天

摘要


This thesis investigates into the syntax of wh-questions in Vietnamese, a language that has rarely been studied in the field of formal syntax. Vietnamese has a relatively rich inventory of wh-elements, each of which carries distinctive syntax and semantics properties. Three syntactic tests, island conditions, intervention effects and indefinite wh construals are offered, and we observe that wh-nominals do not exhibit island violation effects nor intervention effects, and wh-phrases have indefinite uses under certain licensing environments. On the other hand, wh-adverbs are sensitive to locality constraints, and cannot be wh-indefinites. The results suggest that wh-nominals in Vietnamese should be regarded as in-situ wh-variables that are unselectively bound by the Q-operator in CP, but wh-adverbs are compelled to undergo movement (i.e., QR) because they are inherently quantifiers. Meanwhile, Vietnamese wh-questions use a sentence-final particle to signify various semantic/pragmatic effects such as realis mood, strengthening/mitigation, as well as presupposition. This particle, nonetheless, has no correlation with syntactic locality effects because of its optional occurrence in wh-questions which contain island or intervention conditions. This finding poses a direct challenge to Bruening & Tran’s (2006) claim that (a) locality is violated in the absence of the sentence-final particle, and that (b) the particle serves as a key in determining whether unselective binding can work in Vietnamese wh-questions. From a typological perspective, it is argued that Vietnamese and Chinese are grouped together as languages of the unselective binding type, whereas Japanese may be of the Agree type as proposed in Watanabe (2004a). The wh-typology is reshaped with respect to what kinds of syntactic features are involved in the wh-dependency, though the spirit does not go beyond previous studies. This thesis also addresses the issue of “how-why alternations” in Vietnamese. It is shown that the wh-adjunct làm-sao (more often used in the southern dialect) displays such effect: When làm-sao has scope over a full clause, it is interpreted as causal; when it scopes over VP, only the instrumental reading is obtained. Such behavior substantiates Tsai’s (2008) theory as typological evidence. Several differences between Vietnamese and Chinese wh-questions have also been presented in this thesis. Vietnamese has two types of “for-what”, one reason and the other purposive, each corresponding to a specific syntactic position. Considering polarity-wh construals, Vietnamese lacks bare-conditionals but possesses a special phrasal construction [one-wh-that] as a polarity-wh licensing condition.

並列摘要


無資料

參考文獻


Baker, Mark, Kyle Johnson, and Ian Roberts. 1989. Passive arguments raised. Linguistic Inquiry 20:219–251.
Barss, Andrew, Ken Hale, Ellavina Perkins, and Margaret Speas. 1991. Logical Form and barriers in Navajo. In C.-T. James Huang and Robert May, eds., Logical Structure and Linguistic Structure, 5–47. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Pesetsky, David, and Esther Torrego. 2004. Tense, case, and the nature of syntactic categories. In Jaqueline Guéron and Jaqueline Lecarme, eds., The Syntax of Time, 495–538. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Nguyen, Tuong Hung. 2004. The Structure of the Vietnamese Noun Phrase. Doctoral dissertation, Boston University.
Higginbotham, James. 1993. Interrogatives. In Kenneth Hale and Samuel Keyser, eds., The View from Building 20, 195–228. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

延伸閱讀