Prosodic licensing and interpretive asymmetries of shenme in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract In Mandarin Chinese, the interpretation of the wh -word shenme ‘what’ varies across surface-identical constructions, raising long-standing questions about the role of syntax and prosody in clause typing. While previous analyses have focused on syntactic ambiguity or global intonation patterns, they have not adequately accounted for the interpretive asymmetries observed in different shenme configurations. This paper asks: What prosodic conditions license shenme as an interrogative operator, and how do these conditions interact with syntactic structure? To investigate this, we conducted a controlled production experiment with native speakers, analyzing pitch contour and stress placement across V shenme NP, V shenme V, and shenme V NP constructions. The findings show that shenme receives interrogative interpretation only when it bears both nuclear stress and a rising intonation contour, whereas deviations from this prosodic profile yield directive or negative modal readings. We formalize this interaction as the Stress-Intonation Licensing Principle (SILP), arguing that prosody plays an active role in licensing interrogative force through the syntax-prosody interface. This approach highlights the need to integrate prosodic structure into formal syntactic models of clause typing, especially in languages where syntactic marking of illocutionary force is often underspecified.