Dependency Syntactic Analysis of the Non-Interrogative Uses of Chinese shénme

Abstract

The Chinese interrogative pronoun shénme possesses a rich variety of non-interrogative uses. Previous research has mostly classified and described the non-interrogative uses of shénme from functional and semantic perspectives, but systematic analysis of its internal syntactic structure, particularly from a dependency syntax standpoint, remains insufficient. This study systematically investigates the syntactic features of Chinese shénme within the framework of Dependency Grammar. The results show that the syntactic features of shénme exhibit variation depending on its non-interrogative function: when shénme serves as an argument (e.g., in universal, anaphoric, and rhetorical uses), it typically passes constituency tests, constituting a complete syntactic component, and often undergoes scrambling in universal and indefinite uses; however, when shénme serves as an adjunct or as part of an argument (e.g., in enumerative, borrowed, and negative uses), it often fails constituency tests, indicating that it does not form a constituent when it appears within adjunct. This study not only deepens the understanding of the syntactic nature of the non-interrogative uses of Chinese interrogative pronouns but also verifies the applicability and explanatory power of Dependency Grammar in analyzing special linguistic phenomena in Chinese.