Speaker: Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (University of Helsinki / National University of Singapore) Title: Interrogative and standard disjunction in Mandarin Chinese

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Abstract

Mandarin Chinese lexically distinguishes the disjunctors in alternative questions (háishi) and in disjunctive assertions (huòzhe), reflecting a distinction that Haspelmath (2007) and others have called "interrogative" versus "standard" disjunction. In reality, háishi also allows for number of non-interrogative uses, subject to significant speaker variation. I argue that these patterns reflect broadly two types of grammars: those where háishi syntactically enforces that its alternatives be interpreted for question-formation or similar, and those that do not. For the latter, more liberal speakers, háishi can be used non-interrogatively in the same environments that wh-phrases can be. The study and analysis of this pattern of variation leads to the conclusion that a so-called "interrogative disjunction" could be so specified via its syntactic specification or through its semantics alone, with both strategies being attested amongst speakers of Mandarin Chinese.