ABSTRACT
This chapter first argues that the phonological prominence on wh-pronouns marks wh-scope in Chinese. Then experimental data are given about the focus intonation of wh-questions in Chinese, and it is shown that the phonological prominence of the focus on wh-words is the same as the scope of the question. A cross-linguistic comparison between Chinese, Japanese, and Hungarian is also presented to show the different types of scope-marking strategies in these three languages, although wh-words are focus-marked in all languages. This chapter further discusses the connection between focus semantics and Alternative Semantics, and points out that for both foci and questions, there is an isomorphism in terms of the domain of phonological prominence and the semantic interpretation domain. This isomorphism is derived in a compositional system that computes the semantic and phonological properties of Chinese wh-questions in a parallel fashion.
