Abstract

This paper proposes a diachronic analysis of the grammaticalization of a marker of negation into a yes/no question particle in Chinese. I propose that the input to the reanalysis was a vP-neg-vP disjunctive question in which the second vP was projected by a negative auxiliary. Head movement of this auxiliary to the head of an immediately dominating disjunction phrase allowed the negator to enter into an Agree relation with interrogative C and check the [Q] feature there. In time, the negator acquired the [uQ] feature originally on the disjunction. This allowed the negator to subsequently be base merged in C and function as a Q particle.