UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 13 (2001)

A-not-A questions in Cantonese

ANN LAW

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By examining Cantonese A-not-A questions containing quantificational elements and on the assumption of the Minimalist framework (Chomsky 1995), I propose that an A-not-A question is formed by the movement of the question operator base-generated in sentential Neg⁰ head to [Spec,CP] to check the question feature in the head C⁰. (Cf. Cheng 1991, Chomsky 1995) A reduplication of the verb or modal auxiliary immediately dominated by NegP is triggered and inserted before the negative morpheme before Spell-Out. Adopting this configuration, the ill-formedness of A-not-A questions containing elements of quantification in certain structural positions can be explained by the violation of Relativized Minimality (Rizzi 1990).

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