How can zenme(yang) be so?

Abstract

This paper observes that zenme(yang) ‘how’ in Mandarin Chinese can be used not only to express manners but also to convey degrees. A unified compositional analysis of zenme(yang) ‘how’ has been provided to account for the fact that zenme(yang) can be used across two domains: manners and degrees. By borrowing Anderson & Morzycki (2015)’s proposal on the anaphoric words tak and jak, zenme(yang)’s two uses can be modeled by the general notion of kinds: manner zenme(yang) modeled as kinds of events and the degree use modeled as state kinds. For the manner use, zenme(yang) with wh feature is base-generated on the head position of DegP under AP and its trace undergoes the Kind-Shift after wh-movement, which leads to a manner question. Regarding the degree use, zenme(yang), which takes a kind as its complement, needs the negation marker bu ‘not’ to license it. Hence, by borrowing the general notion of kind, it becomes feasible to achieve a compositional unification for the two uses of zenme(yang).