Mei shenme ‘few/little,’ mei ‘not,’ and neg raising in Mandarin Chinese

This article explores how non-interrogative wh-word shenme ‘what’ in Mandarin Chinese interacts with a negative element mei ‘not’ at the grammar interfaces. It investigates how information in the lexicon interacts with syntax and prosody, with a case study of Insignificance Shenme Sentences (ISS) in Mandarin Chinese. Contra previous semantic-pragmatic analyses, a lexical-syntactic proposal is put forward to explain the restrictions involved in ISS. It is assumed that the insignificance reading of ISS is directly related to mei shenme, which is analyzed as a lexical unit with the meaning of ‘few/little.’ Due to high analyticity in Modern (Mandarin) Chinese (Huang 2015), the negative element mei in mei shenme NP undergoes neg raising (Collins and Postal 2014) from postverbal object position upward into a lower negation phrase NEG_LP, which immediately dominates VP, resulting in the surface form of ISS. Given the syntactic complexity restriction on the NP, mei in NEG_LP is argued to be distinct from a normal sentence/aspect negator mei in a higher negation phrase NEG_HP. In this vein, the NP complexity restriction can be accommodated, when considered together with an interaction hypothesis between focus stress and nucleus stress (Wang 2017; Wang and Chin 2019). The current analysis demonstrates how lexicon, syntax, and prosody cooperate to derive sentences with wh-words and negation in Mandarin Chinese.