Different Behaviors of Wh-words in Chinese Wh-question Acquisition by Deaf Students

WH-questions without WH-words

Such WH-less WH-Questions (let us call them WLWQs) are very often used as questions in written tests or uttered by quizmasters in quizzes, though not often in daily conversations. 2 I assume that, despite their restriction in the range of registers, WLWQs are also constrained by the knowledge of human language. To my knowledge, there has been no previous research on WLWQs in the field. This pap...

How does Prosody Distinguish Wh-statement from Wh-question? A Case Study of Standard Chinese

There are wh-sentences which express speech acts of interrogative or declarative with the same syntactic structure in standard Chinese, such as, "bǎobao chīdiănr shénme?"(What does the baby intend to eat?) and "bǎobao chīdiănr shénme."(The baby intends something to eat.) The interrogative pronoun "shénme" (what)has different semantic functions, such as specific reference in the interrogative se...

A Prosodic Analysis of Wh-words in Standard Chinese

This paper is a phonetic study of prosody of wh-words in whquestions, yes/no-questions and echo questions in Standard Chinese. The production data from 4 speakers show that there is a prosodic difference of wh-words and the corresponding VPs between different question types. Wh-words in whquestions are the focus of sentence, whereas in yes/noquestions, VPs are the focus. The focused constituent...

Local and Global Implicatures in Wh - Question

The unacceptability of wh-question disjunctions can be given a semantic explanation if we take the partition theory of questions as a basis (Groenendijk and Stokhof 1982, 1984). According to this theory, a question defines a partition of the logical space. A disjunction of two questions is then a union of two partitions, which is not again a partition: there are overlapping cells. Thus the disj...

Grammar, Performance, and the Wh-Question Typology