Chinese linguistics and typology: The state of the art

Language and Linguistics

This study re-examines the widely studied V-qilai 'rise-come' construction in Mandarin Chinese. It first distinguishes V-qilai + predicate construction from the lexical verb qilai and -qilai as a lexical inchoative morpheme, which do not require an additional complement. In addition, three variations of the V-qilai + predicate pattern are identified according to the complement functions: namely (i) a descriptive complement, (ii) an object-oriented descriptive predicate, and (iii) a proposition clause (raising construction). These three variants are subsumed under and accounted for by the proposed uniformed secondary predication structure, while vary with their respective complement structures. In addition, the occurrences of V-qilai were drawn from Academia Sinica Corpus. Based on the above classification, it is shown that there is a far greater preponderance of canonical qilai usages over the V-qilai + complement ones, indicating that the latter patterns are still emerging ...

2011

This book (henceforth referred to by the acronym 'HLL', based on the authors' initials), published in the Cambridge series devoted to the theoretically well-grounded description of the syntax of individual languages, is the first serious attempt, in English, at such a comprehensive work on Mandarin Chinese: while the linguistic community has seen various descriptive and reference grammars, these never strove to base their data-level observations consistently on a coherent theoretic framework-which is the clear intention of the current volume, even if this comes at the price of giving up somewhat on full coverage, as the Introduction openly admits it (p. 3). Instead, the authors focus on those data, constructions, and issues related to them that have received sufficient attention, and/or satisfactory analyses, in the realm of generative linguistics, in the past 30 years or so. And in fact, all three authors are, and have been for some time now, among the best-known, most central, most renowned figures of Chinese generative grammar, which immediately guarantees a certain level of quality, but also sets the readers' expectations high, at the same time. The book is organized into nine chapters, the first two of which lay the general foundations for the rest, discussing issues concerning the syntactic category system of Mandarin, and the predicate-argument relations, thereby acquainting the readers (especially those who are not well-versed in current generative theory) with many concepts and considerations that will become crucial in understanding and fully appreciating the oncoming analyses. The seven subsequent chapters then treat specific chunks of the syntax of Mandarin one by one, with particular attention devoted to those phenomena that have triggered the most heated (or most fruitful) debates within the generative literature, such as the ba-and bei-constructions, the structure of interrogatives, or the patterns of anaphora. Generally speaking, the overall structure of the book suits the chief goals well, the authors manage to keep good proportions among the topics, as well as between theory and description. If there is anything to be critical of at this general level, it is a clear sense of indecision on behalf of the authors as to how deeply they should go into explaining the underlying theory: sometimes (especially in the first half of the book) these 'background clarifications' are frequent and lengthy (occasionally to the extent that the text almost sounds like an introductory textbook in syntactic theory), while in many other cases (mostly in the second half) the delicacies of technical explanations run so wildly profound that no one without a solid basis in recent Chomskyan linguistics stands the slightest chance to be able to follow them. In other words, I would be hard-pressed to determine the real target audience of this book: for the theoretical linguist interested in Chinese, many explanatory parts are superfluous (a particularly obvious such case is the discussion of theta theory in Chapter 2), while for someone interested in Mandarin grammar, but without a firm background in generative theory, certain sections must be extremely difficult (if not outright impossible) to cope with, e.g., the discussion of beipassives (esp. 134ff.), or the treatment of the relative construction (esp. 221ff). That basically leaves us Chomskyan syntacticians with a stake in Chinese as the well-targeted readership-not a huge crowd, I am afraid. In what follows, I will treat the chapters' contents, one by one, pointing out the particular strengths and weaknesses therein. The content part of the book sets out with the groundwork of establishing the inventory of syntactic categories of Mandarin: Chapter 1 (Categories). In the domain of lexical categories, besides the obvious noun $ verb distinction, we find three issues of notable peculiarity discussed: the classification of (so-called) localizers, the question of the independent category of adjectives, and the definition of the category of prepositions in this language. Concerning localizers, one traditional debate was about the categorial unity vs. duality of monosyllabic and disyllabic localizers (e.g., N(-de) li-bian 'N (-DE) inside-side' vs. N-li 'N-inside') and another one about whether they are basically nouns or postpositions. The conclusion here is that while disyllabic ones are nouns (though on the verge of losing their nominal identity), the monosyllabic ones constitute a minor independent category of some sort: 'noun deviates'. While the arguments against them being either nouns or prepositions proper are sound, the categorization offered is really just a nicer way of saying 'we don't know', and since for expository purposes the localizers are called and labeled as 'localizers (L)' throughout the discussion, anyway, they might as well have been assigned to a genuinely independent category by this name. On the question of adjectives as an Lingua 121 (2011) 313-319

2004

This innovative study of grammaticalization in Chinese offers a highly accessible and comprehensive overview of both the diachronic development and current syntactic status of a wide variety of grammatical morphemes in Chinese. Approaching the issue of grammaticalization from a formal, theoretical point of view, but also making use of traditional insights into language change, Xiu-Zhi Zoe Wu shows how a range of syntactic mechanisms have conspired to result in the grammatical constructions and functional morphemes of modern Chinese. Patterns from Chinese and an indepth analysis of the development of functional categories in the language are also used to argue for more general, cross-linguistic principles of language change, and provide valuable insights into the principled ways that grammatical words evolve across languages. Grammaticalization and Language Change in Chinese is a bold and inspired attempt to apply formal, Chomskyean syntactic theory to the traditional area of the study of language change. Although the analyses of the book are cast within such a theoretical approach to language, the data and generalizations brought to light should be of considerable interest to linguists from quite different backgrounds, and the central ideas and intuitions of the various chapters are presented in a way that makes them accessible to a wide and varied readership. The book is not only a highly informative and useful resource on Chinese but also clearly indicates what Chinese is able to show about language change and the phenomena of grammaticalization in general.

In this paper, we model the dialectal variation in the expression of defi-niteness in Mandarin and Cantonese adopting the Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) framework (Pollard & Sag, 1994) and Minimal Re-cursion Semantics (MRS) (Copestake et al., 2005).

The issue of choosing language data on which synchronous linguistic research is being done appears in many ways not only to be relevant to the goal of the research, but also to the validity of the research results. The problem which particularly concerns us here is the discrepancy between speech on the one hand and written language on the other. In this context, we have often encountered in the past a situation where the result of the research conducted on a variety of the Chinese language has been generalized to the entire synchronous state of the language, i.e. to all other varieties of the language, while ignoring the mentioned discrepancy between the spoken and written forms. The discrepancy between the spoken and written forms is likely to be present in any natural language with a written tradition, but the degree of difference between languages is uneven: e.g. compared to the Slovak language, it may be stated that the situation in Chinese is in this respect extraordinary. 1 Nevertheless, it is surprising that the quantitative (qualitative) research on discrepancies between different varieties of the language has not yet aroused the attention of Chinese linguistics to such an extent as would have been adequate for the unique situation of this natural language. 1 The degree of non-correspondence between written language and speech across languages is determined by many factors. One of them, certainl y, is the unequal extent of a written tradition.