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.
為了持續優化網站功能與使用者體驗,本網站將Cookies分析技術用於網站營運、分析和個人化服務之目的。
若您繼續瀏覽本網站,即表示您同意本網站使用Cookies。