City University of Hong Kong Dep
Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics
Research Seminar
What Are Intervention Effects?
Presented by
Prof. Xu Liejiong
Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto
Date: 24 November 2006, Friday
Time: 4:30pm - 5:30pm
Venue: B7603 (Lift 3, 7/F, Blue Zone),Academic Building,CityU
Abstract
The combination of a wh-word with a quantificational or focusing element leads to ungrammaticality in certain configurations cross-linguistically. It is known as intervention effects. It has been claimed by some researchers that focus operators like zhi ‘only’, ye ‘also’ and quantificational expressions like meiyou-ren ‘nobody’, hen shao ‘very few’, induce intervention effects in Chinese interrogative sentences containing weishenme ‘why’ and in A-not-A questions. For instance, the following sentences are unacceptable: *Meiyou ren weishenme qu? *Ta ye qu-bu-qu? This presentation addresses the question: how unitary are intervention effects and concludes that such questions may be unacceptable for different semantic reasons.
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Speaker
Prof. Xu Liejiong, formerly Professor (Chair) of Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong, affiliated to the Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto since retirement in 2002. Author/editor of 14 books and over 100 articles/chapters, including articles published in Language, Linguisic Inquiry, Lingua, the Linguistic Review, etc.
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