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The Syntax of Chinese
Abstract
The past quarter of a century has seen a surge in Chinese syntactic research that has produced a sizeable literature on the analysis of almost every construction in Mandarin Chinese. This guide to Chinese syntax analyses the majority of constructions in Chinese that have featured in theoretical linguistics in the past 25 years, using the authors' own analyses as well as existing or potential alternative treatments. A broad variety of topics are covered, including categories, argument structure, passives and anaphora. The discussion of each topic sums up the key research results and provides new points of departure for further research. This book will be invaluable both to students wanting to know more about the grammar of Chinese, and graduate students and theoretical linguists interested in the universal principles that underlie human languages.
... Cunnings & Sturt, 2014;Sturt, 2003), the situation becomes less clear once we look at Chinese, where the perspective-sensitive reflexive ziji can be readily exempt from Principle A (e.g. Charnavel et al., 2017;Huang & Liu, 2001;Huang et al., 2009;Pan, 1997;, as in (1a,b). Native-speaker judgments concerning the binding possibilities in (1a,b) indicate that long-distance binding of ziji is allowed and even preferred when verb semantics and discourse context favor the non-local antecedent. ...
... While ziji is clearly subject to non-structural constraints (e.g. Huang & Liu, 2001;Huang et al., 2009), the case of the bi-morphemic ta-ziji is controversial. This reflexive consists of the personal pronoun ta ('s/he') and the reflexive ziji ('self') and is typically thought to strictly obey the locality constraint (e.g. ...
... Note that the difference between ziji and ta-ziji in terms of LD binding is related to their linguistic properties. LD ziji is often treated as a logophoric reflexive (Huang & Liu, 2001;Huang et al., 2009) or an "exempt anaphor" (Charnavel et al., 2017) governed by discourse-pragmatic conditions, as opposed to regular anaphoric reflexives such as ta-ziji which is largely constrained by locality. It is widely agreed that logophoric reflexives typically refer to perspective holders or empathy loci (e.g. ...
This study investigates the real-time processing of Chinese reflexives ziji and ta-ziji in discourse when multiple constraints are involved. Our primary goal is to examine the time course of syntactic and non-syntactic constraints in reflexive resolution. The Syntactic Filter Hypothesis argues that syntactic cues are prioritized at the early stages of processing, in contrast to the Multiple Constraints Hypothesis which posits that at this stage all streams of information can be recruited. The results of two self-paced reading experiments show that in neutral contexts where no antecedent is discourse-prominent, syntactic locality and verb semantics immediately impact real-time processing of ziji and ta-ziji. Crucially, participants’ processing patterns are also influenced at an early stage by the discourse topical status of the non-local antecedents. Overall, these findings suggest that syntax, verb semantics, and discourse prominence all play important roles at an early stage.
... One usage of "sudah" is to indicate an action's completion or a situation's occurrence, which must precede the verb. An example is shown in (8). ...
... Indonesian: Ayah sudah memuji kakak dan adik Chinese: 爸爸 已经 表扬 哥哥 和 姐姐 English word: Dad already praise brother and elder sister English: Dad has praised her brother and elder sister (8) As shown in the coding of time information, Mandarin Chinese and Thai can use aspect markers and their combination with time adverbs, while Indonesian has no language item corresponding to the Chinese aspect marker "le". In this study, we selected Mandarin Chinese learners with Thai and Indonesian L1 backgrounds as participants. ...
... According to the previous relevant research, we had the following predictions for our experiments. First, given that Mandarin Chinese aspect markers are morphologically marked and are attached after the verbs [8][9][10], both LAN and P600 could be evoked by English: Dad has praised her brother and elder sister (7) The Indonesian language also lacks morphological inflections. The time system of Indonesian is not expressed by morphological inflections, but by the time words "sudah" and "telah" [25]. ...
Previous studies on the neural cognitive mechanisms of aspectual processing in second language (L2) learners have focused on Indo-European languages with rich inflectional morphology. These languages have aspects which are equipped with inflected verb forms combined with auxiliary or modal verbs. Meanwhile, little attention has been paid to Mandarin Chinese, which has limited morphological inflection, and its aspect is equipped with aspectual particles (e.g., le, zhe, guo). The present study explores the neurocognitive mechanism of Mandarin Chinese aspect processing among two groups of late Mandarin Chinese proficient learners with Thai (with Mandarin Chinese-like aspect markers) and Indonesian (lack of Mandarin Chinese-like aspect markers) as their first language (L1). We measured event-related potentials (ERPs) time locked to the aspect marker le in two different conditions (the aspect violation sentences and the correct sentences). A triphasic ELAN-LAN-P600 effect was produced by the Mandarin Chinese native speakers. However, there was no ELAN and LAN in Indonesian native speakers and Thai native speakers, except a 300–500 ms negativity widely distributed in the right hemisphere and P600-like effect. This suggests that both groups of Mandarin Chinese learners cannot reach the same level as Mandarin Chinese native speakers to process Mandarin Chinese aspect information, probably due to the complex feature of Mandarin Chinese aspect maker, the participants’ L2 proficiency and age of L2 acquisition.
... Being a verb, bei takes an embedded clause in which the object is coreferential with the matrix subject and undergoes deletion. These two approaches, as reviewed in and Huang et al. (2009), have limits of their own. A third hybrid approach was later proposed by Chiu (1995), Ting (19951998), Feng (1997, Cheng et al. (1999), and. ...
... grade (Huang et al. 2009: 117) 'Zhangsan i informed Lisi j of his i/*j own grade. ' ...
Assigning you constructions in Mandarin Chinese are special in that they often read like passives. With this in mind, the goal of this paper is twofold. First, I aim to compare assigning you constructions with typical passive constructions of bei in Mandarin Chinese. Second, I attempt to seek an approach that may derive assigning you constructions desirably. The research results are as follows. I have found that assigning you constructions and bei passives differ both semantically and syntactically. I argue, contrary to Xiong (2010) , that you is not a passive morpheme since, unlike Mandarin bei passives or English be passives, assigning you constructions do not always exhibit the initial NP as a Patient or Theme. I also argue against the traditional treatment of you as a preposition and instead propose that you is a three-place predicate taking an IP complement. I show that the bi-clausal structure deriving from the verb analysis receives empirical support from binding phenomena.
... Following a standard analysis (Huang 1982(Huang , 1988(Huang , 1991, the Qoperator initially merges with the predicate at surface syntax and moves to C at LF to check off the interrogative feature. The LF feeds into compositional representation, where Q is interpreted as taking the predicate as its argument and derives a disjunctive set out of it, yielding an interrogative (alternativebased) reading (Huang 1991;Hagstrom 2006;Huang et al. 2009). In this sense, Q patterns with wh-adjuncts, assuming with Tsai (1994) that Mandarin wh-adjuncts undergo LF-movement while wh-arguments do not. ...
The Suzhounese polar question exhibits intervention effects, manifested by the linearity constraint barring anti-topical expressions against c-commanding the polar particle. This paper proposes to derive the intervention pattern from two assumptions. Namely, the polar operator is interpreted higher than the C-domain Q operator, and topics project a secondary illocutionary act independently of the primary act associated with the comment. I further show that the Suzhounese pattern is linked to linearity constraints elsewhere (e.g. in why-adjuncts) that crucially draw upon the exceptional wide scope of topics. I point out that the connections I have drawn motivate a novel class of scope effect that is distinct from the better understood focus-induced intervention.
... section 2.1.3), where the frequency/duration phrases are regarded verbal modifiers, instead of nominal modifiers(Ernst 1994, Soh 1998, Huang et al. 2009). ...
Providing novel evidence from discontinuous predicates in Cantonese, this paper argues that partial deletion applies to the word level. A number of disyllabic verbs in Cantonese may appear as discontinuous strings where the two syllables are separated by suffixes and/or phrasal elements. We propose that their derivation involves a conspiracy of multiple operations in Narrow Syntax and in the Phonological Form (PF): (i) verb movement in Narrow Syntax creates copies; (ii) affixes induce a PF syllable deletion rule on the higher copy; (iii) partial Copy Deletion applies to the lower copy. Consequently, partial deletion not only applies to phrasal constituents (Fanselow and Cavar 2002), but also to words/heads. We also maintain a relatively conservative understanding of Copy Deletion by scattering the deletion to a PF deletion rule and Copy Deletion, where the partial effect is due to disruption of the latter by the former.
... Speaker A: Ni-men dou kan guo tai-tan-ni-ke-hao le ma? you all see EXP Titanic PERF SFP 'Have you seen Titanic?' Speaker B: Kan guo le. see EXP SFP '(We) have already seen (it).'Amongst the non-canonical word orders of Chinese, we focus on the ba construction (seeHuang et al. 2009, Li 2006, Kuo 2015, exemplified in (10).(10) Wo ba dan-gao chi le.I BA cake eat PERF 'I ate the cake.' ...
According to a traditional line of thought, children’s deviant early productions are due to lack of (access to) functional projections. Work starting in the 90’s showed that functional projections are in fact available from the earliest two-word productions, and feature values are set in accordance with the target adult grammar. More recent work by Yang (2002) assumes availability of the functional architecture of the sentence but claims that feature values may not be established for a varying period of time. After the work of Candan et al. (2012) that investigated the comprehension of word order in English, Mandarin and Turkish, in this paper we present some new results on feature setting in infants exposed to Mandarin Chinese. By means of the preferential looking paradigm, we test twenty-four 17-month-old children exposed to Mandarin in the comprehension of canonical SVO and non-canonical ba constructions (with preverbal objects). The infants’ gazing behaviour indicates that by this age they not only understand canonical SVO, but also the non-canonical order, as had been found for French clitic left dislocation by Lassotta et al. (2014). In view of the new results and other obtained in the same experimental paradigm, an interpretation in terms of an agent-first strategy is not feasible, and thus we are lead to the conclusion that the feature values of the functional projections responsible for e.g. the ba construction, a resultative construction, are available by 17.5 months of age, well before children reach the two-word stage.
... Es wird jedoch kein signifikanter Unterschied zwischen dem Mittelwert der abnormalen Sätze und der Sätze ohne Skript erwiesen.Wir nehmen es an, dass die Sätze mit kontrastiven Beziehungen zwei atelische Aktionen beschreibt, weil zwei telische Aktionen in der Lage sind, eine mögliche temporale Beziehung darzustellen, für die aber kein kognitives Skript vorhanden ist. In dieser Studie sind die Aktionsarten der Prädikate in allen vergleichenden Sätzen atelisch.In diesem Experiment wird bestätigt, dass sowohl die Auswahl des Junktors als auch die Beziehung zwischen dem Skript und der Abfolge der Ereignisse im Satz die Akzeptabilität der koordinierten Sätze beeinflussen.Bezüglich der Sätze mit temporalen Beziehungen lässt sich zeigen, dass weder bingqie noch erqie zwei CP mit einer temporalen Beziehung koordinieren kann, auch wenn beide laut C.-T. J.Huang et al. (2009) als grammatische Satzjunktoren gelten. In diesem Bezug verhalten sich beide Junktoren anders als und im Deutschen oder and im Englischen. ...
Die Satzjunktoren in der natürlichen Sprache, beispielsweise und im Deutschen, hat im Vergleich zu dem logischen Konjunktor ∧ einen Umfang unterschiedlicher Bedeutungen. Mit Verwechselung der beiden Teilsätze in einem durch und koordinierten Satz wie Thomas kam ins Klassenzimmer und Anna öffnete das Fenster ändert sich die Bedeutung des Gesamtsatzes dementsprechend, weil eine zeitliche Reihenfolge im Satz zu erkennen ist. Solche Bedeutungsaspekte der koordinierten Sätze sind pragmatisch angereichert, weil sie sich nicht auf eine rein wahrheitskonditionale Konjunktion reduzieren lassen. Während die Annahme nach dem Neogriceschen GCI-Modell nahe liegt, dass der zeitliche Bedeutungsaspekt nach einem durchs Lernen erworbenen Mechanismus automatisch erschlossen werden kann, wendet sich die Relevanztheorie an den natürlichen Verarbeitungsprozess und kognitive Skripts des Kognitionssystems. In Bezug auf den Erwerb eines solchen Mechanismus und die Rolle der kognitiven Skripts unterscheiden sich die beiden Ansätze voneinander. Im Chinesischen liegt jedoch kein allgemeingültiger Satzjunktor für Phrasen aller Sorten wie und vor. Obwohl chinesische Satzjunktoren wie erqie und bingqie zwei Teilsätze mit einer möglichen temporalen Beziehung grammatisch verbinden können, die Akzeptabilität von solchen Sätzen ist allerdings fragwürdig.
Im Experiment 1 der vorliegenden Studie werden die Einflüsse der chinesischen Satzjunktoren sowie der kognitiven Skripts auf die Akzeptabilität der koordinierten Sätze geprüft. In diesem Offline-Experiment bewerteten die meisten Teilnehmenden Sätze mit einer möglichen temporalen Beziehung, die durch die beiden Satzjunktoren koordiniert werden, als unakzeptabel. Das zeigt, dass ein Unterschied in der pragmatischen Bedeutung besteht zwischen den chinesischen Sätzen, die durch die beiden Junktoren koordiniert werden, und den deutschen Sätzen, die durch und koordiniert werden. Andererseits zeigen die Ergebnisse, dass die Akzeptabilität von Sätzen mit kognitiven Skripts signifikant höher ist als die von Sätzen ohne Skripts und von Sätzen mit einer den kognitiven Skripts entgegengesetzten Reihenfolge der Ereignisse, was darauf hindeutet, dass die Beziehung zwischen der Reihenfolge der Ereignisse in einem Satz und den kognitiven Skripts einen signifikanten Einfluss auf die Akzaptabilität von Sätzen hat.
Anhand des Beispiels der chinesischen DaF-Lernenden, deren L1 Chinesisch und L2 Deutsch ist, wird es im Experiment 2, einem Online-Experiment, untersucht, ob der Unterschied auf der pragmatischen Ebene zwischen L1 und L2 das Verstehen der Sätze in L2 beeinflusst. In den Wahrheitsbewertungsaufgaben lasen die chinesischen DaF-Lernenden deutsche Sätze und entschieden, ob die nächstfolgenden chinesischen Sätze richtig waren. Die deutschen Testsätze beschrieben zwei Handlungen, die Reihenfolge von denen mit einem kognitiven Skript konform ist oder wozu kein konventionelles kognitives Skript zugänglich ist. Die chinesischen Testsätze werden durch ranhou (danach), danshi (aber) oder parataktisch koordiniert. Wenn Sätze mit ranhou als richtig bewertet werden, zeigt es, dass die Teilnehmenden die temporale Beziehung im dargestellten deutschen Satz erkannt haben. Die Analyse der Lesezeiten der deutschen Sätze zeigt, dass sich kein signifikanter Unterschied erwies, ob es ein kognitives Skript zugänglich ist. Bezüglich der Reaktionszeiten zu den chinesischen Sätzen lässt sich zeigen, dass die Verarbeitungszeiten der Sätze mit Skripts kürzer sind. Die Ergebnisse der Wahrheitsbewertungsaufgaben zeigen, dass Sätze mit kognitiven Skripts eher als richtig beurteilt werden.
Die Ergebnisse machen deutlich, dass chinesische DaF-Lernenden den temporalen Bedeutungsaspekt in mit dem Junktor und koordinierten deutschen Sätzen erkennen können, und der temporale Bedeutungsaspekt für sie besser zu erkennen ist, wenn ein kognitives Skript zugänglich ist. Weil die temporale Beziehung in den deutschen Sätzen in diesem Experiment nicht explizit war, lässt sich dieses Verständnis der Teilnehmenden pragmatischen Anreicherungen zuschreiben, wenn sie die chinesischen Sätze mit dem temporalen Junktor als richtig bewerteten. Auf der einen Seite können die Teilnehmenden bei der Verarbeitung der Sätze in L2 solche Bedeutungen erkennen, auch wenn ähnliche Sätze in ihrer L1 unakzeptabel sind. Auf der anderen Seite waren die Reaktionszeiten zu den chinesischen Sätzen wegen der kognitiven Skripts auch kürzer, und die chinesischen Sätze mit expliziten temporalen Bedeutungsaspekten wurden auch eher als richtig bewertet, was darauf hinweist, dass die kognitiven Skripts die Verarbeitung von koordinierten Sätzen mit temporaler Bedeutung fördern. Die Ergebnisse liefern Beweise für den relevanztheoretischen kognitiven Ansatz, der davon ausgeht, dass die pragmatische Performanz eher auf dem menschlichen Kognitionssystem basiert.
... One reviewer states that the topic element need not be nominal, as seen in (ia). As for (ia), I claim that in a canonical construction, tsia̍ h-tinn 'to eat sweet food' is an infinitive clause (also secondary predicate in Huang et al. 2009), which is located at TP layer and it follows the vP ài 'love' , the main predicate. An infinitive clause is always treated as a nominal element (Aldridge 2016). ...
This paper delineates an alternative analysis of the property concepts of ū ‘have’ in Taiwan Southern Min, claiming that the complements serve syntactically as the nominal gradabilities through three syntactic (constituency) tests, and supported by a crosslinguistic perspective. Additionally, in the vein of Distributed Morphology, the gradability functions as an nP (also as a nominalization), in contrast with NP/DP. From a typological perspective, it is not peculiar for ū to select a nominalization of property concept to signal a reading of property-denoting. Moreover, I illustrate the semantics of a possessive property concept construction in Taiwan Southern Min, according to Francez and Koontz-Garboden (2015, 2017). I further propose a modal aspectual semantics to interpret the various temporal readings of ū. Finally, I draw a conclusion to my alternative analyses.
The Chinese language has the longest well-documented history among all human languages, making it an invaluable resource for studying how languages develop and change through time. Based on a twenty-year long research project, this pioneering book is the English version of an award-winning study originally published in Chinese. It provides an evolutionary perspective on the history of Chinese grammar, tracing its development from its thirteenth-Century BC origins to the present day. It investigates all the major changes in the history of the language within contemporary linguistic frameworks, and illustrates these with a wide range of examples taken from every stage in the language's development, showing how the author's findings are relevant to contemporary descriptive, theoretical, and historical linguistics. Shedding light on the essential properties of Chinese and, ultimately, language in general, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students of Asian linguistics, historical linguistics and syntactic theory.
We review two conflicting accounts of the argument-adjunct (a)symmetry found in topic structures in English and in the Romance languages. Based on the contrast, we examine topic structures in Mandarin Chinese, especially the behaviors of adjunct topics in multiple-topic sentences, embedded clauses, and non-declarative sentences. We observe a systematic extraction asymmetry in these environments between argument and circumstantial-adjunct topics, on the one hand, and manner-adjunct topics, on the other. The new findings from Mandarin Chinese suggest that the argument-adjunct asymmetry of the topic structure in English is only apparent, and the extraction asymmetry should be understood cross-linguistically as a movement-merger asymmetry (Haegeman 2012a: Adverbial clauses, main clause phenomena, and composition of the left periphery, OUP). In this respect, we propose that argument topics and circumstantial-adjunct topics in Chinese are base-generated in the fronted topic position, and manner-adjunct topics are results of syntactic movements. The topicalization asymmetry in Mandarin Chinese can be further unified with Tsai’s (1994: On economizing the theory of A-bar dependencies, MIT dissertation) theory of the nominal-adverbial asymmetry of wh-dependencies in Chinese, where argument wh-phrases and circumstantial wh-phrases (including time, location, and instrumental wh-phrases) also resort to the base-generation strategy (through merger and LF binding), and manner-adverbial wh-phrases make use of the movement strategy (through LF movement).
This paper proposes an analysis of telicity in motion predicates within the framework of the Exo-Skeletal Model ( Borer 2005b ). We hypothesize that a motion event is syntactically represented by a Path component, the core of which is a v P that introduces a Figure argument. This Path component is interpreted as quantity in the sense of Borer (2005b) when there is a certain type of morpheme present in the structure, such as a verb that denotes the reaching of an endpoint. A quantity Path component can then assign a semantic value to a functional projection called Asp Q P, which returns a telic interpretation. Data from Mandarin, Ghanaian Student Pidgin, and Southern Tati show Asp Q P can be assigned a value either with or without overt head movement. We further propose a distinction between Path and direction, which explains data that were left unexplained in previous studies and seemingly contradict our claim.
The two forms of Thai reflexive anaphors, tuaɁeeŋ ‘self’ and tua+pronoun+Ɂeeŋ ‘pronoun-self’, have been claimed to exhibit different referential patterns. While tuaɁeeŋ only co-refers with a local antecedent np within the same clause, tua+pronoun+Ɂeeŋ can refer to both local and distant antecedent np s. In this study, a self-paced reading experiment was used to examine whether and how Locality Bias guided the comprehenders’ online interpretation of tuaɁeeŋ and tua+pronoun+Ɂeeŋ . Our results showed that the reading time was significantly faster when a reflexive anaphor referred to a local np than when it did to a a distant np , regardless of the forms. This suggests that a local antecedent was preferred for both types of reflexives manifesting locality bias effect. Post hoc tests revealed that tua+pronoun+Ɂeeŋ appeared to be more sensitive to the locality bias than tuaɁeeŋ . This may result from the presence of the personal feature in tua+pronoun+Ɂeeŋ , which could restrict reference to local antecedents.
In the duō event quantity construction, duō ‘much’ is a quantity adjective. What duō ‘much’ modifies is the root of the verb and the root has to move to the light verb position to be categorically defined. The quantity adjective duō ‘much’ functions to introduce a measure function which measures the event denoted by the verb along the dimension valued by the assignment function A , and the domain to which the measure function applies must be monotonic. So, the ‘modification’ relation between the quantity adjective duō ‘much’ and its modifyee essentially differs from that between a typical gradable adjective like tián ‘sweat’ and its modifyee. This explains how the quantity adjective duō ‘much’ differs from the typical adjective in syntax and semantics.
In this paper, I focus on the Mandarin spatial preposition zai (‘at’), which can appear in the VP domain, like other spatial prepositions, but which can also appear in the TP domain, where it’s presence or absence is sensitive to the animacy and definiteness properties of its object. I argue that zai’s distribution and behavior in the TP domain is expected if it functions as a differential argument marker triggered by internal topicalization of its object. Implications of the current analysis for the internal structure of spatial PPs are also considered.
This study uses computational approaches to clarify the syntactic problems of dangling topic construction in Mandarin Chinese. It explicitly computes the relation between topic and comment in dangling topic construction in Chinese using semantic similarity and pointwise mutual information (PMI). We propose three methods for computing the semantic similarity between topic and comment. We also carry out experiments on human ratings of the acceptance degree for a set of dangling topic constructions. The results demonstrate that PMI and the three measures of semantic similarity can make good predictions about the data on the human ratings. These measures play a similar role to that of semantic plausibility in entire sentence comprehension. This is the first time that PMI and sentence-based semantic similarity are employed to predict how humans comprehend sentences as a whole. The PMI and semantic similarity measures are likely to shed further light on the notion of topic construction and to help in seeing how Chinese native speakers understand and process sentences. More importantly, this study creates a novel, effective and practical computational approach for predicting entire sentence comprehension/processing and syntactic analysis.
Within linguistics, the formal and functional approaches each offer insight into what language might be and how it operates, but so far, there have been hardly any systematic attempts to integrate them into a single theory. This book explores the relationship between universal grammar - the theory that we have an innate mechanism for generating sentences - and iconicity - the resemblance between form and meaning in language. It offers a new theory of their interactions, 'UG-iconicity interface' (UG-I), which shows that not only do universal grammar and iconicity coexist, but in fact collaborate in intricate and predictable ways. The theory explains various recalcitrant cross-linguistic facts surrounding the serial verb constructions, coordination, semantically and categorically obscure 'linkers', the multiple grammatical aspects of the external argument, and non-canonical arguments. This groundbreaking work is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students in linguistics, as well as scholars in psychology and cognitive science.
This paper develops a syntax-pragmatics interface analysis of imperative clauses overtly marked by two grammatical categories of qing ‘please’ in Mandarin and refines the division of labor among directive force, clause typing and deontic modality jointly computing the interpretative properties of qing imperatives. We present a cluster of properties to differentiate between the two categories of qing and observe that qing ¹ denotes obligation imposed on the addressee by the speaker, while qing ² denotes permission with which the addressee is allowed to perform an action or make true a state of affairs according to a set of norms. It is argued that qing ¹ is an imperative mood head, while qing ² is an imperative adverb, but both are endowed with a similar internal composition and extent of the phrasal hierarchies of the CP periphery, and their disparate imperative properties can be ascribed to the addressee-oriented and subject-oriented deontic modality (Tsai & Portner 2008). Following Haegeman & Hill's (2013) version of the Speech Act Phrase, we claim that a speech act layer externally merges to the topmost position of ForceP to drive the syntax-pragmatics interface computation of the speaker-addressee relation and to mediate the imperative mood and clause typing represented in the CP layer.
After critically reviewing the conflicting theories of word-formation, the integral model in Li 2005 is presented which is shown not only to make a minimal number of postulations but also to cover a wide range of cross-linguistic facts: morphological causativization in Bantu and Semitic, compounding in Chinese and English, the resultative constructions in Chinese, and noun-incorporation in Amerindian. Underlying this chapter is the long-lasting debate in this part of linguistic theorization as well as the methodological implications of the integral solution.
The question of what canonical word order Chinese has is not a controversial issue at the present time; most of the studies within the last 30 years assume that the canonical word order of Modern Chinese is SVO. However, during the 1970s and 80s there was a lively debate on Chinese word order concerning its historical development as well as its status in Modern Chinese. This chapter reviews the arguments for and against SVO as the canonical word order in Chinese. Arguments for SVO originated as reactions against two claims: Chinese is in the process of becoming an SOV language, and Modern Chinese is an SOV language. A wide range of arguments have been brought forth to argue against the two claims, including historical development, grammar internal considerations, typological features, and discourse analysis.
Words pose a theoretical challenge in Chinese, but words pose a challenge in any language. Even though Chinese is written with monosyllabic, monomorphemic characters and no overt word boundaries, there is as much evidence here as there is in English or any other language for a level between the morpheme and the phrase, interfacing between the lexicon and the grammar. Yet their interface role makes words dynamic things, subject to distinct and often conflicting constraints from processing, semantics, phonology, morphology, and syntax. To emphasize the universality of this situation, the chapter starts with a quick look at the dynamic nature of English words before turning to focus on Chinese words, which a wide variety of data reveal as surprisingly English-like, including a strong preference for disyllabicity. The chapter ends by sketching a formalism that may help capture the universal yet dynamic nature of wordhood, showing how it helps account for some of the Chinese facts.
Case theory is a theoretical tool in the generative grammar to capture generalizations regarding categorial distribution, particularly the nominal category in relation to others. The notion of case can describe the close relation between grammatical categories, such as a verb/preposition and its object, or the subject of a sentence and the tense or agreement of the sentence. This chapter reviews the advantages of adopting the notion of abstract case in Chinese, a language without overt morphological case marking. Data and issues discussed include how the challenges Chinese poses to the word order correlations proposed as universals or tendencies in typological studies cease to be problems if the notion of abstract case interacts with word order universals, what the postverbal structure constraint is in Chinese, and how Case plays a role in the analysis, whether there are true pre-nominal PPs in Chinese, and whether tensed and non-tensed clauses can be distinguished in Chinese, as well as the role of case in capturing the behavior of clauses.
The linguistic study of Chinese, with its rich morphological, syntactic and prosodic/tonal structures, its complex writing system, and its diverse socio-historical background, is already a long-established and vast research area. With contributions from internationally renowned experts in the field, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey of the central issues in Chinese linguistics. Chapters are divided into four thematic areas: writing systems and the neuro-cognitive processing of Chinese, morpho-lexical structures, phonetic and phonological characteristics, and issues in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. By following a context-driven approach, it shows how theoretical issues in Chinese linguistics can be resolved with empirical evidence and argumentation, and provides a range of different perspectives. Its dialectical design sets a state-of-the-art benchmark for research in a wide range of interdisciplinary and cross-lingual studies involving the Chinese language. It is an essential resource for students and researchers wishing to explore the fascinating field of Chinese linguistics.
The linguistic study of Chinese, with its rich morphological, syntactic and prosodic/tonal structures, its complex writing system, and its diverse socio-historical background, is already a long-established and vast research area. With contributions from internationally renowned experts in the field, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey of the central issues in Chinese linguistics. Chapters are divided into four thematic areas: writing systems and the neuro-cognitive processing of Chinese, morpho-lexical structures, phonetic and phonological characteristics, and issues in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. By following a context-driven approach, it shows how theoretical issues in Chinese linguistics can be resolved with empirical evidence and argumentation, and provides a range of different perspectives. Its dialectical design sets a state-of-the-art benchmark for research in a wide range of interdisciplinary and cross-lingual studies involving the Chinese language. It is an essential resource for students and researchers wishing to explore the fascinating field of Chinese linguistics.
The linguistic study of Chinese, with its rich morphological, syntactic and prosodic/tonal structures, its complex writing system, and its diverse socio-historical background, is already a long-established and vast research area. With contributions from internationally renowned experts in the field, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey of the central issues in Chinese linguistics. Chapters are divided into four thematic areas: writing systems and the neuro-cognitive processing of Chinese, morpho-lexical structures, phonetic and phonological characteristics, and issues in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. By following a context-driven approach, it shows how theoretical issues in Chinese linguistics can be resolved with empirical evidence and argumentation, and provides a range of different perspectives. Its dialectical design sets a state-of-the-art benchmark for research in a wide range of interdisciplinary and cross-lingual studies involving the Chinese language. It is an essential resource for students and researchers wishing to explore the fascinating field of Chinese linguistics.
This chapter aims to provide a careful examination of Mandarin Chinese classifiers from a syntactic perspective. A comprehensive overview of the distribution of classifiers is provided along with their syntactic analyses. A central conclusion of this chapter, following much recent work, is that there are two distinct structural configurations that numeral classifiers participate in, and that these structures can distinguish the type of classifier participating in the structure as well as its semantic interpretation. The syntactic analyses are complemented with formal semantic analyses of numeral classifiers.
This chapter shows that treating the Chinese classifier system as a lexicalized semantic system based on shared ontology predicts both the agreement patterns that motivate the structure-based accounts, and the semantic selection patterns that motivate the cognition-based accounts. In the chapter, different perspectives toward classifiers are introduced including a cognition-based account (predicting a strong correlation with perception that is also robust and without exceptions but allows some fuzzy, overlapping classifications) and a structure-based account (predicting a strongly binary classification and a robust grammaticality judgement). Controversial issues regarding Chinese classifiers, such as the distinction between classifiers and measure words, the agreement between a classifier and its head noun, and the nature of 的 DE insertion, are explicated to show the pros and cons of various approaches. The authors demonstrate that Chinese classifiers are coherently organized in a ontology-driven lexical-semantic system. Major unresolved issues in the Mandarin classifiers system are closely examined at the end of the chapter.
Syntactic processes trigger changes in the movement-parameter of Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) numeral signs. Though HKSL cardinal numerals by default do not contain movement and are produced in neutral space, under specific circumstances, the movement-parameter can be altered from [∅] to specifications for both path- and hand-internal movement. This creates four types of numerals: (1) event numerals, (2) transfer numerals, (3) conjunction numerals, and (4) list numerals. I analyze the syntactic structures of these four numerals as follows: Firstly, event numerals quantify the number of times an event denoted by V has occurred and in syntax the numeral is located in a FreqP in Spec,VP. Secondly, transfer numerals show transfer of ownership and are within the DP complement of V ⁰ . Thirdly, the conjunction numeral indicates that all items of a set are included and the numeral is located within ConjP. Finally, the list numeral is the head of a NumeP with a [list]-feature within DP.
In this review, we summarize studies investigating comprehension of three core grammatical structures (Subject-Verb-Object word order, grammatical aspect and wh-questions) in diverse samples of Mandarin-acquiring preschoolers with ASD, all utilizing the Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL) paradigm. Results showed that children with ASD, though they were delayed in chronological age and expressive language (including significantly lower vocabulary production scores), acquired various grammatical constructions similarly to their typically developing peers. Moreover, Mandarin-acquiring preschoolers with ASD demonstrated similar acquisition patterns of these three core grammatical structures, as has been reported in previous IPL studies among English-acquiring children with ASD ( Naigles & Fein, 2017 ). Thus, the results testify that universal underlying mechanisms are playing vital roles in grammatical acquisition of children with ASD across languages (e.g., the setting of word order parameters, the preservation of functional morphemes, the universal operation of WH-Movement), despite their pervasive social cognition impairments. These findings suggest that core grammatical knowledge may be preserved in children with ASD, even in the face of radical differences in language environment and social/communicative deficits, supporting the contribution of the language faculty in autistic language acquisition. The results shed light on the sharp contrast between linguistic competence (governed by the internal computational system of the language faculty) vs. linguistic performance (affected by loci of impairment in the sensory-motor and the conceptual-intentional interfaces) in ASD. Furthermore, the results highlight the dissociation between the lexical vs. the grammatical modules in ASD, supporting a modular view of the diverse language domains in the language faculty.
Shi and lian … dou/ye can both be used as focus constructions in Mandarin Chinese. The current paper aims to investigate the shi and lian … dou/ye constructions within the framework of Syntactic Cartography. The two constructions share very similar syntactic distributions; however, shi and lian are not in the same syntactic position, or more precisely, the former is located higher than the latter. The two constructions mark various foci, namely, adjunct focus, predicate focus, subject focus, and complement focus. In terms of the focus meaning, they express foci of different types, namely, shi introduces the exclusive focus and lian signals the inclusive focus, which is retained in their lexical meanings during the process of grammaticalization of the two words. Both shi and lian can occur at the sentence-initial position and the sentence-internal position. The current research agrees with the previous studies that the sentence-initial lian-XP serves as topics while the sentence-internal lian-XP functions as foci. This paper claims that the sentence-initial shi-phrase also expresses topics and further argues that the sentence-initial shi-phrase marks topic foci whereas the sentence-initial lian-phrase marks focus topics which both carry the [Topic] and [Focus] features but differ in the feature strength. It is concluded that shi can be analyzed on a par with lian in Mandarin Chinese.
This paper studies the “one+verbal classifier” sequence tsi̍t-ē that appears after an indefinite object complement in Taiwanese Southern Min. We call it the post-complement (PC) tsi̍t-ē . While the tsi̍t-ē sequence can be a durative phrase when it is immediately preceded by a verb, the PC tsi̍t-ē cannot be replaced by the durative phrase tsi̍t-ē-á ‘a while’ ( tsi̍t-ē plus the diminutive suffix á ) or other durative phrases. We show that the PC tsi̍t-ē is a sentence-final particle, not a durative phrase serving as a predicate or complement. Moreover, it marks delimitativity, which means ‘termination in a short time.’ It is the same kind of delimitativity that verb reduplication in Mandarin Chinese expresses despite the fact that the latter targets on the verb and is more selective in terms of the verb types that it can occur with. Moreover, the PC tsi̍t-ē carries the ‘down-play’ meaning. Syntactically, we suggest that it heads an AspP, which occurs above a v P.
Unlike adjunct wh’s-in-situ, argument wh’s-in-situ do not seem to be subject to island constraints in Chinese and other East Asian languages. This difference in island sensitivity between argument and adjunct wh’s-in-situ is known as argument–adjunct asymmetry in the theoretical literature. Recently, this long-established asymmetry is challenged by a formal judgment study. It was claimed in the study that this asymmetry is an illusion and both argument and adjunct wh’s-in-situ are subject to island constraints. The present study demonstrates that such a claim is not convincing because it is based on problematic experimental design. We designed two experiments to test the island effects on Chinese wh’s-in-situ. The results reaffirm that the argument–adjunct asymmetry in Chinese wh’s-in-situ is indeed present, contrary to the findings of previous formal judgment study, and they also corroborate our assumption that when object wh’s-in-situ like shénme ‘what’ are located inside a relative clause, they are subject to a pragmatic constraint, suggesting that the VP (formed by a verb and its wh-object) in the relative clause tends to describe the prominent/salient feature of the relativized nominal head.
This paper aims to propose a syntactic approach to derive the three reduplication patterns for disyllabic words in Mandarin: the ABAB verbs, the AABB verbs, and the AABB adjectives. Based on Borer’s exo-skeletal model, I argue that there is no direct connection between the category and the form. The morphemes to be reduplicated enter syntax as roots which are unvalued both in categorial property and semantic content. The syntactic context determines both their category and the domain within which they must match with a reasonable content. I propose that there are three types of reduplication morpheme respectively involved in the derivations: ReASP, ReDER, ReDEG, and the relative order between reduplication and categorisation is the key factor affecting the availability of event structures and non-compositional interpretations. The study shows that some problems which are traditionally discussed in the morphological or semantic domain are in fact syntactic in nature.
By drawing on data of two types of VP dislocation in Mandarin, this paper argues that these two types represent a syntactic incarnation of XP‐split constructions providing an interesting argument for the conception of information structure starting in the numeration and multiple Spell‐Out of copies regulated by the checking of strong features over the course of a syntactic derivation. Building on Fanselow and Ćavar’s (2002) distributed deletion analysis, I show that Type 1 involves two autonomous nominals that form a nominal predicate structure in a VP, and the VP is copied and internally merged to a topic position, followed by multiple Spell‐Out of the copies whose information structural features are checked. In contrast, Type 2 is derived via base‐generation. I argue that the two types are derived employing the same set of operations in the computational system without extra postulations. Issues involved in dealing with Mandarin topic constructions are addressed.
抽象的
本文以澄海話的量名短語為研究對象，考察了澄海話量名短語的句法位置及其語義解讀之間的關係。調查發現，主語位置上的量名短語通常是有定的，賓語位置上的量名短語通常是無定的，但如果量名短語是控制句中的賓語控制語，或者量名短語是受損或受惠題元角色時，可以有無定、有定兩種解讀。我們認為，量名短語有定、無定兩種解讀情況的出現，是句法條件與語境因素共同作用的結果。句法上來說，量名短語都是中心語D為空的DP短語，無定量名短語的D由存在量詞為其賦值，而有定量名短語的空D由DisP中的先行詞為其賦值，量名短語的有定解讀應該看作是語用有定。
Among various types of nominal phrases, the appositive construction has long been a relatively under-researched subject in the literature of Chinese linguistics. This paper centers on the use of the appositive construction [P(ronoun)-Num(eral)-Cl(assifier)-Nominal Phrase (NP)] in Mandarin Chinese. Upon revealing a series of asymmetries in syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, this paper proposes an attributional versus identificational distinction for Chinese appositives. Specifically, for the attributional case, the apposition (i.e. [Num-Cl-NP]) is property-denoting and serves to rationalize the speaker’s evaluation about the referent denoted by the anchor (i.e. the P); for the identificational case, the apposition is individual-denoting and serves to facilitate referent identification of the anchor by picking out an identifiable quantified set of discourse referents from the given context. To formally capture this distinction, this paper develops a dichotomous analysis for the syntax of Chinese appositives. The non-unified treatment not only offers an effective explanation for the asymmetries exhibited by the appositives under different cases, but also contributes to a better understanding of Chinese appositives in general.
Readers sometimes fail to notice word transposition errors, reporting a sentence with two transposed words to be grammatical (the transposed-word effect). It has been suggested that this effect implicates parallel word processing during sentence reading. The current study directly assessed the role of parallel word processing in failure to notice word transposition errors, by comparing error detection under normal sentence presentation conditions and when words are presented serially at 250 ms/word. Extending recent results obtained with serial presentation of Chinese sentences (Liu, Li, Cutter, Paterson, & Wang, Cognition 218: 104922, 2022), in Experiment 1 we found a transposed-word effect with serial presentation of English sentences. In Experiment 2, we replicated this finding with task instructions that allowed responding at any time during the presentation of the sentence; this result indicates that the transposed-word effect that appears with serial word presentation is not due to a late process of reconstruction of short-term memory. Thus, parallel word processing is not necessary for a transposed-word effect in English. Like Liu et al. (2022), we did find that the transposed-word effect was statistically larger with parallel presentation than with serial presentation; we consider several explanations as to why this is so.
In this article, I will investigate a special pronoun Ta that appears in the postverbal thematic position of various constructions in the Wuhan dialect of Chinese. I will argue that all the sentences containing Ta can be unified under an Agree‐based resumptive analysis. More specifically, I will claim that Ta, differing from the regular pronouns, is φ‐feature deprived (or a weak pronoun), which is the reason why the pronoun can function as a resumptive pronoun in ba‐constructions (a case of A‐resumption) on a par with A‐traces/copies. Furthermore, I will argue that the completion‐inducing effect of Ta does not necessarily entail that Ta is an aspectual marker; rather, the effect is due to the exceptional omission of the telicizing verb particle inside the small clause; therefore, Ta remains to be a resumptive pronoun throughout.
This study identifies the SFP təu in Chengdu Chinese as a C-element encoding deontic modality, such as commission or permission, depending on the person(s) of the subject. Moreover, it conveys conditionality in that the implementation of an action requires the completion of another action. It is conditionality that gives rise to a temporally sequential reading, which is dominant enough to earn təu a term as “antecedent aspect marker”. Syntactically, conditionality occurs in an adjunct CP, and this CP is further adjoined to an elided IP, in which deontic modality is located. This IP further projects to a higher CP accommodating the deontic modal SFP təu.
Keywords
Təu
SFPAntecedentConditionalDeontic modalityChengdu Chinese
This work investigates the division of labor between mood and illocutionary force in syntax by examining three modal construals encoded by the speaker-oriented adverb zuìhǎo ‘best’ (deontic, epistemic and evidential) in Mandarin, and accounts for a cluster of syntactic and pragmatic properties it is associated with. Very much in line with Tsai’s ( 2015a , 2015b and 2015d ) modal system in Mandarin, it is observed that each type of zuìhǎo can co-occur with its matching modal auxiliary in the fashion of Cinque’s (1999) ‘location-in-Spec’ hypothesis and encodes a certain type of illocutionary force. One persistent question is how zuìhǎo substantiates illocutionary force in syntax, while its designated position is not situated in the licensing domain of ForceP. As far as the left periphery is concerned, this work argues for a conspiracy between syntax, semantics and pragmatics to ensure the success in activating the Bidirectional Agree relation between speech act, force and mood. We argue for a speech act layer (Sa*P) externally merging to CP ( Speas and Tenny, 2003 ), whose head values the uninterpretable speech act feature [ u Sa] on Force ⁰ via the Bidirectional Agree to trigger its interface with the utterance content (CP). Meanwhile, following Kempchinsky’s (2009) idea, it is further argued in this work that Force ⁰ hosts the uninterpretable feature [ u W] which has to be checked and valued by the modal construals of zuìhǎo to determine the irrealis-realis mood. An immediate implication is that ForceP serves as a gateway to not only mood but also speech act at the interface. Several issues involved in dealing with zuìhǎo are discussed.
Building on recent work on anaphoric definiteness, this paper presents arguments that there is a general distinction between plain and indexed definite DPs, distinguished by the presence of a syntactically rep- resented index—IdxP—in [Spec, DP]. Typical instances of indexed definites include anaphoric definites, complex demonstratives (e.g. that linguist), and pronominal definites (e.g. we linguists). Several arguments for in- dexed definites are brought together from the syntax and semantics of referential expressions in English and Mandarin and the typology of defi- niteness marking. A new argument for the proposed syntax and semantics is then presented from anaphoric definite DPs in Marka-Dafing (Mande). Co-occurrence restrictions between exophoric and anaphoric demonstra- tives in Marka-Dafing, which are argued to be quite general, provide addi- tional support for the idea that indexed definites use a dedicated syntactic position in [Spec, DP].
This study investigated why object-gap relative clauses (RCs) are dominant in early child Mandarin. We discuss how restrictive-RCs differ from pseudo-RCs syntactically and pragmatically, and examine how these two types of RCs are distributed in the RC utterances of ten children and their caregivers. The results showed that (a) Mandarin-speaking children produce many more pseudo-RCs than restrictive-RCs, (b) restrictive-RCs exhibit a subject-gap advantage and are dominantly headed, and (c) pseudo-RCs exhibit an object-gap advantage and are dominantly headless. We propose that the development of restrictive-RCs is mainly influenced by the structural factor, and that the extensive use of pseudo-RCs is attributed to the communicative needs of young children. Our findings also suggest that young children’s pseudo-RCs tend to have a subject-focus reading, and the object-gap dominance observed in the pseudo-RCs of child Mandarin is related to the head-final RCs and the special structural features of the cleft construction in Mandarin.
Evidence from Chinese Wh-questions strongly suggests that LF locality is a matter of referentiality and nominality, while locality in overt syntax involves the requirement of head government. This observation echoes thesplit ECP approach of WAHL (1987). Specifically, Chinese arguments and referential adjuncts (when, where, instrumentalhow and purposewhy) contrast with nonreferential adjuncts (mannerhow and reasonwhy) in allowing wide-scope construals out of islands in LF. Overt Wh-fronting, on the other hand, displays an argument/adjunct asymmetry. This paper proposes to deal with the LF asymmetry within the Generalized Binding framework, in association with the referential/nonreferential distinction among Wh-elements. With the ECP reduced to thegeneralized binding principles (GBPs), it further argues for a type of locality employing the notion ofcheckpoints instead ofbarriers, according to which the [N] feature is checked along with the [WH] feature through Comp-indexing. Consequently, nominal clauses are always islands for nonnominal/nonreferential adjuncts, because either selectional restrictions or the GBPs will be violated by long-distance extraction. This move is independently motivated by a parallel asymmetry in Chinese (non)bridge-verb constructions.
The syntactic status of locative particles such as shang 'on'., li 'in' has long been a problem in Chinese syntax. This paper reviews the properties of these particles and considers three approaches that have been proposed in the literature. We will show that all three approaches run into difficulty. We will then suggest that locative particles are best treated as clitics. They take the preceding NP as the scope and cliticize to the left. This analysis explains why locative particles cannot stand alone, why they do not behave exactly like nouns or postpositions, and it also gives the correct semantic interpretation for locative phrases containing complex NPs. Our analysis suggests that locative particles actually do not have a syntactic status; they are not assigned any syntactic category. Rather, they can be analyzed in a morphological theory which treats clitics as phrasal affixes.
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In this article, the morphological and syntactic peculiarities of Chinese A-not-A questions are revisited. With reference to the observation that Standard Mandarin shares significant typological features with prototypical SOV languages, Chinese is treated as an underlyingly verb-final language. Based on this heuristic principle, all subtypes of A-not-A questions are uniformly derived by means of one simple raising rule that operates within the sentence constituent V′. In contrast to the prevailing trend, it is further argued that the question operator contained in A-not-A sentences cannot be raised to "Comp." In consequence, A-not-A questions are "typed" in the head position of a sentence-internal functional phrase that I call Force2 Phrase (F2P). The existence of a head position F20 is supported by the fact that it can be occupied by certain overt question operators occurring both in several Chinese dialects and in Standard Mandarin. The analysis suggested precludes the interpretation of the lexical item ne as a "typing particle" in the sense of Cheng (1991). Hence ne is treated as a predicate-final modal particle.
Various proposals for treating the word even in a transformational grammar of English are reviewed. It is shown that the word cannot be derived from a structure in which it is directly associated with that portion of the sentence which constitutes its semantic scope. An alternative account based on principles of interpretation of derived structure is sketched and motivated. The semantic content of the word is suggested as the source of limitations on its appearance within the sentence.
Recent work has suggested that head-complement word order should be accounted for with parameters which specify the direction of case and θ-role assignment. Evidence against this view is presented here. It is shown that such a system requires a type of X’-internal movement not countenanced by current theory and for which no empirical support exists, predicts the existence of word orders which are not in fact attested, and is unable to account for the word order of Mandarin Chinese. A new account of the word order inside X’ is proposed, which states that only natural classes of elements are able to appear on one side or the other of the head. These natural classes are defined in terms of θ roles and case.
This paper deals with the issue of plurality in Mandarin Chinese. It discusses,in general linguistic terms of operations of quantification and determination, two alleged plural markers of Mandarin Chinese, (yĪ)xiēand -men. It is shown that both are, not plural, but collective markers, referring to wholes. However, they differ in two important respects. First, they do not suppose the same level of determination. (YĪ)xiēposits a set of elements, whereas -men constructs a group from several already posited elements. In short, unlike (yĪ)xiē, -men implies definiteness. Second, while (yĪ)xiēindicates a purely quantitative operation (that is, extraction of a certain number of entities taken as a whole), -men basically marksa subjective location: several individuals are grouped together relative to the speaker or some other subjective origin. In so far as it implies an intersubjective relationship,-men pertains to the grammatical category of person.
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Standard views about the factors that determine verb position and subject position predict that there should be Subject-Verb-Object languages in which tense and aspect are indicated by a particle or auxiliary that comes before the subject. Julien's (2000) large-scale survey of the languages of the world, however, indicates that this word order is never found. This striking gap suggests that the theory of how verbs are related to tense needs to be rethought. I suggest that the gap can be explained by abandoning Chomsky's (1993, 1995) checking theory, in which the relationship between the T node and the inflected verb can be established ly. The correct word order typology follows if the computational system of human language can combine tense and verb only by overt head movement (Baker 1988, Pollock 1989) or by the PF merger of morphemes under adjacency (Marantz 1988, Bobaljik 1994).
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IntroductionA-not-A as a reduplicative inflectional morphemeMovement of NQ and parallels to weishenme ‘why’Focus marking and A-not-A questionsFurther surface scope restrictions on NQNegative particle questions and VP-not-V questionsVP-not-VP questions as VP-VP questionsCrosslinguistic notesConclusion: closing remarks
IntroductionPropertiesCross-dialectal comparison with Taiwanese kaStructuresConstraintsConclusion
For decades, passives as a major grammatical category in both English and Chinese have been subject to much research, both corpus-based and non-corpus-based. A number of contrastive studies of passives in English and Chinese have been published, but they have not used corpus data, being based, rather, on a handful of examples which are common to nearly all of those papers (e.g. Fan 1994; Wang 1997; Yu 2001; Zhou and Xia 2002; Gu 2003). The work presented in this article combines the corpus methodology with a contrastive perspective, seeking to provide a more systematic account of passive constructions in the distinct languages on the basis of corpus data. Four corpora are used in this study. The Freiburg-LOB corpus (i.e. FLOB) is an update of LOB (Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen corpus of British English, see Johansson, Leech and Goodluck 1978) which sampled texts published in 1991-1992 (Hundt, Sand and Siemund 1998). A second corpus, the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (i.e. LCMC), was designed as a Chinese match for FLOB, representing written Chinese published in China in the early 1990s (McEnery, Xiao and Mo 2003). Both corpora consist of five hundred 2,000-word samples taken proportionally from the same 15 genres in English and Chinese, each totalling one million words. The two comparable corpora have not only made it possible to compare English and Chinese in general, they have also allowed us to reveal more fine-grained genre distinctions between the two languages. The genres covered in FLOB/LCMC and their proportions are given in Table 1.
This paper provides support for the claim that there are two functional projections in full noun phrases, Determiner Phrase (DP) and Number Phrase (NumP), based on an analysis of the dual marker in Modern Hebrew. The assumption of two nominal functional categories permits a structural account of differences in the distribution of elements that function as first/second person pronouns and those that function as third person pronouns. It is hypothesized that 1st/2nd person pronouns are DPs which contain only the head D and that this head is specified for person, number and gender. In contrast, 3rd person pronouns have a more complex structure, where D is specified for person and Num is specified for number and gender. Similarities between past tense agreement and 1st/2nd person pronouns on the one hand and between present tense agreement and 3rd person pronouns on the other suggest that the same nominal functional categories that act as pronouns also act as agreement. In other words, the difference between pronouns and agreement lies not in their category, but in their role in the syntax. Finally, this view of pronouns and agreement is applied to complex null subject phenomena in Modern Hebrew. In order to account for the fact that the distribution of null subjects varies across persons and across tenses, we propose a matching condition on both the category and content of the null pronoun and agreement.
While recognizing a fundamental distinction between syntactic use of reflexives and nonsyntactic use of reflexives, we propose that this distinction is not necessarily one of lexical ambiguity, contrary to what has been commonly assumed (e.g., Baker (1995)). Instead, we posit just one type of referentially dependent element – reflexives – which avail themselves of two options for being related to their antecedents, namely, syntactic binding and discourse coreference. We focus on Chinese reflexive ziji but will also consider reflexives in American English and British English. Data from these languages indicate that obligatory binding (as stated in Principle A of Chomsky (1986)) is something of a special case and should not be taken as a general model for a cross-linguistic approach to reflexives. We also show that argument structure is relevant to long-distance binding in Chinese, and thus the syntactic binding domain can be defined in terms of relative OBLIQUENESS of grammatical relations rather than a purely tree-configurational relation, e.g., C-COMMAND.