1. Li Zhen Email: zl912808@ohio.eduzl912808@ohio.edu

2.  Chinese Wh Questions  Wh-in-situ (no movement)  Wh-movement

3.  Previously, scholars do not agree with each other if there is movement in Wh questions. Generally, there are three schools:  Wh-movement  Wh-in-situ  Wh-movement/Wh-in-situ  This study is trying to figure out if there is movement (fronting) in Mandarin Wh questions, and the answer is yes, are there any patterns that we could follow.

4.  Soh, H. L. (2005). Wh -in-Situ in Mandarin Chinese. Linguistic Inquiry, 36(1), 143-155.  Lai-Shen Cheng, L., & Rooryck, J. (2000). Licensing Wh-in-situ. Syntax, 3(1), 1-19.  Watanabe, A. (1992). Subjacency and S- structure movement of wh-in-situ. Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 1(3), 255 - 291.  C.-T. James Huang, Audrey Li and Yafei Li (2009). The Syntax of Chinese, Cambridge University Press  etc

5.  Is Madarin a Wh-fronting or in-situ language?  If there is movement of Wh-words/phrases, what are the syntactical conditions/patterns.  Which Wh-words/phrases are moveable (under certain conditions), which are not?  What do Chinese and other languages have in common in terms of the syntactical structure of Wh questions?

6.  Data Sources: The Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC) by Tony McEnery and Richard Xiao, Lancaster University

7.  Procedure:  1. Collect and sample Wh-questions from the LCMC Corpus  2. Analyze the syntactical structures of the Wh- questions  3. Categorize the Wh-words/phrases by Determiner/Pronoun/Adverb (and maybe Negation as well)

8.  Analysis  1. With the data available, I hope it will be possible to identify which categories may have movement, and indentify the patterns for it.  2. I also hope the data can allow me to compare the syntactical structure of Mandarin Wh- questions with those in other languages (English and Russian)

9.  My first and foremost concern is time. Since we have always been very busy, I am concerned that I will not have enough time to work on the reading/learning and analysis.  The LCMC corpus has one million words, but it contains only written text. In spoken discourse, there should be more freedom in Wh-movement.

10.  My hypotheses  Mandarin does have Wh-movement (fronting) under certain conditions, so what are they?  Only some Wh-words/phrases can move. What are their characteristics?  What are the general patterns and parameters of Wh-questions’ syntactical structures of Mandarin and other languages have in common (especially English)