ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses two theories of wh-questions in terms of the principle of Economy in the Minimalist Program. The first theory of Chinese wh-questions is “LF movement”. The second theory is the “binding theory”, which resorts to a Q morpheme to interpret wh-variables in situ. It is shown that although the LF movement theory can give a more uniform account of wh-questions across languages by setting parameters in the syntax, it is less ideal given the principle of Economy and the syntactic analyticity nature of Chinese syntax. Therefore, the binding theory is favored compared to the LF movement theory. However, the binding theory faces many theoretical and empirical problems. Synchronic arguments are given to show that there is really no wh-question particle in Chinese. Furthermore a formal diachronic semantics analysis of the grammaticalization of the particle –ne in Chinese shows that the sentence-final particle –ne is most likely a topic marker.
