Yes/no questions and A-not-A questions in Chinese revisited

Abstract

In this article, the morphological and syntactic peculiarities of Chinese A-not-A questions are revisited. With reference to the observation that Standard Mandarin shares significant typological features with prototypical SOV languages, Chinese is treated as an underlyingly verb-final language. Based on this heuristic principle, all subtypes of A-not-A questions are uniformly derived by means of one simple raising rule that operates within the sentence constituent V'. In contrast to the prevailing trend, it is further argued that the question operator contained in A-not-A sentences cannot be raised to Comp. In consequence, A-not-A questions are typed in the head position of a sentence-internal functional phrase that I call Force2 Phrase (F2P). The existence of a head position F2 0 is supported by the fact that it can be occupied by certain overt question operators occurring both in several Chinese dialects and in Standard Mandarin. The analysis suggested precludes the interpretation of the lexical item ne as a typing particle in the sense of Cheng (1991). Hence ne is treated as a predicate-final modal particle.