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Intervention effects and wh-construals

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Abstract

The exploration on wh-intervention effects generally suffers from distributional variations both across and within languages. In this study, a specific, clear divide with respect to wh-intervention effects in Mandarin Chinese is investigated, which in turn sheds light on the puzzling variations in general. I show that the variations of intervention effects cannot be handled in a uniform way. They can be at best captured if we categorize them into two types of syntactic effects, i.e., minimality effect and competition effect, each of which is triggered by independent factors. Meanwhile, to cover the intervention effects crosslinguistically, it is essential to take into account the typological difference of in-situ wh-construals. The various distributions of intervention effects are, then, a natural result of the interplay between the different types of intervention effects and wh-construals.

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    Barry Chung-Yu Yang

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Yang, B.CY. Intervention effects and wh-construals. J East Asian Linguist 21, 43–87 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-011-9080-5

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