Chapter 6. System repairing strategy at interface

Wh -words in Chinese are ambiguous in specific contexts. In actual conversational situations, when speakers put different combinations of stress with intonation on sentences, the relevant wh -words are no longer ambiguous. The encoded prosodic forms can be analyzed as phonological features in the feature bundles associated with a given lexical item in the Lexical Array. Since these prosodic features have semantic effects on the output of the computational system at the Conceptual-Intentional interface, they satisfy Legibility conditions and therefore, they do not violate the Inclusiveness condition. Prosodic marking is only activated as a last resort in cases where semantic ambiguity arises, which can be viewed as a system repairing strategy at interfaces in the sense of Reinhart (2006) .