The myth of extraction in Mandarin Chinese: Licensing wh-fronting and wh-extraction from coordination

This thesis investigates the licensing conditions for wh-fronting and wh-extraction from coordinate
structures in Mandarin Chinese, with a comparison to those in English. We argue that
wh-fronting in Mandarin Chinese is a discourse-driven movement that is licensed by the Referential
Constraint and that exhibits strong existential commitment: the former requires the
wh-phrase to be D-linked, while the latter requires the answer to a fronted wh-question to be
positive. We adopt an attitude particle analysis, and analyse it as the movement of the D-linked
wh-phrase to [Spec, AttP], which realises the strong existential commitment.
For asymmetric extraction from coordination in Mandarin Chinese, we argue that the whextractee
is subject to the Specificity Constraint, which requires the extractee to denote a proper
subset of the contextually salient set, a condition that differs from the licensing condition governing
asymmetric extraction from coordination in English. We suggest that the specificity and
D-linkness of the wh-phrase are realised at the D head and the Dem head, respectively: Dlinking
requires the lexical realisation of the Dem head, and specificity is established via Agree
between the D head and the relevant wh-element. We further propose a measure of the island
strength of the non-initial conjunct with respect to the referentiality of the wh-phrase, showing
that the resistance to extraction from the non-initial conjunct is greater in Mandarin Chinese
than in English.
For ATB extraction from coordination in Mandarin Chinese and English, we recast the structural
parallelism requirement as the landing site requirement, which requires the extractee to
land in the same position. This uniformly accounts for the presence/absence of the structural
parallelism requirement in English and Mandarin Chinese. We ultimately adopt a featureintersection
approach to ATB constructions: the extractees are presented as feature bundles
and move to the same landing site. Feature intersection takes place at that position, yielding a
single feature bundle prior to Vocabulary Insertion. This leads to the unification of the conditions
on ATB constructions, with the landing site requirement and the morphological identity
as sub-conditions of the single constituent requirement.