Where has the new information gone? The Chinese case

Abstract

In this paper I would like to show that the principles which have been proposed so far to account for the relationship between the informational level and the syntactic level in a Chinese utterance are unable to predict some interesting and regular facts of that language. To my mind, the form and the position of the question operator in an interrogative utterance provide two distributional tests which univocally indicate where the new information lies. Hence, the pairing of affirmative and interrogative sentences might be a better approach to locate where the new information lies in a Chinese utterance.