Chapter published in:
Interfaces in Grammar
Edited by Jianhua Hu and Haihua Pan
[Language Faculty and Beyond 15] 2019
► pp. 133–166

System repairing strategy at interface

Wh-in-situ in Mandarin Chinese

| The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Institut Universitaire de France, CNRS
Wh-words in Chinese are ambiguous in specific contexts. In actual conversational situations, when speakers put different combinations of stress with intonation on sentences, the relevant wh-words are no longer ambiguous. The encoded prosodic forms can be analyzed as phonological features in the feature bundles associated with a given lexical item in the Lexical Array. Since these prosodic features have semantic effects on the output of the computational system at the Conceptual-Intentional interface, they satisfy Legibility conditions and therefore, they do not violate the Inclusiveness condition. Prosodic marking is only activated as a last resort in cases where semantic ambiguity arises, which can be viewed as a system repairing strategy at interfaces in the sense of Reinhart (2006).
Published online: 15 April 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.15.06pan
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