DERIVING VP-NEG QUESTIONS IN MODERN CHINESE: A UNIFIED ANALYSIS OF A-NOT-A SYNTAX

This paper advocates a unified analysis of various subtypes of A-not-A questions, including VP-neg questions. It is proposed that all A-not-A subtypes are derived from a simplex VP source via morphological reduplication, with certain subtypes undergoing a further process of anaphoric ellipsis. Under this proposal, VP-neg questions are formed by deleting the second VP of a reduplicated VP-not-VP structure. It is argued that the analysis of VP-neg as an A-not-A variant is more desirable than the analysis of VP-neg as being on a par with a particle question (Cheng et al. 1996), because a number of parallelisms are shown to exist between VP-neg and other subtypes of A-not-A questions, but not between VP-neg and typical particle questions.