This talk focuses the possible readings of wh-in-situ in Chinese in different contexts. Mandarin data will be systematically compared with Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. We will show how the interrogative Q-reading and the existential $-reading associated with a wh-word are formally licensed in different types of contexts. Importantly, different languages dispose different strategies to license wh-words in each specific licensing context: morphological strategies, syntactic strategies and prosodic strategies. However, these licensing mechanisms do not have the same status; namely, the morphological licensing is always in priority whereas prosodic licensing is only activated as a last resort when morphological or syntactic strategies [...]