The Invertible Construction in Chinese

In Evie Coussé, Peter Andersson & Joel Olofsson (eds.), Grammaticalization meets Construction Grammar (Constructional Approaches to Language 21), 241-276. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2018

Language Research, 2007

This paper proposes a syntactic account for the Direct Object Restriction, which states that resultatives must be object-oriented. The restriction is absent in the V-V resultative constructions in Chinese because the head movement from the resultative to the matrix verb extends the control domain, making both the subject and the object of the matrix verb available as an antecedent of the subject of the resultative. By contrast, in the de resultative constructions, as well as the resultative constructions in English, there is no head movement from the resultative to the matrix verb, and thus the subject of the resultative is controlled by only the nearest argument of the matrix verb, i.e., the direct object.

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

In this study I examine a large number of verbalizations in the Chinese Pear narratives and find that for each scene examined there is usually one or at most two favored and stabilized verbalizations, with variability around the stabilized forms. These favored verbalizations are the preferred states of the system for expressing concurrent events, transfer of objects, perfectivity in event construal etc., and they may be thought of as strong attractors in the behavior space in terms of complexity theory. These attractors exert a force on the grammatical system, and impose a frame on them and model the development of new forms. Further research in Chinese grammar into the wide ranging, dynamic and systematic variability as well as stability within and across individuals is urged.

Proceedings of the 16th North America Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL 16), 2004

This paper discusses semantic properties of lian-constructions in Mandarin Chinese, a type of constructions that can be compared to English 'even' sentences. It is argued that the two kinds of lian-constructions, lian...dou and lian...ye, require an asymmetrical analysis, and a major difference between them can be accounted for by the (non-)occurrence of certain presuppositions. The evidence is drawn from the felicitousness of the two lian-constructions in different contexts. It is also pointed out that an effect on the sufficiency of informativeness depends on the positional occurrence of them in the contexts.

Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, 2022

Mandarin Chinese allows implicit objects, non-canonical objects, and quantityobject. The first type is seen in Wo zhao-guo-le 'Lit.: I looked for', which means I have looked for some entity that is known to the interlocutors. The second type is seen in Lili qie-le na ba da dao 'Lit.: Lili cut that big knife', which means Lili cut something with that big knife. The third type is seen in zou-le yi li 'walked one mile'. From the perspective of the interaction of yòu 'again' with different kinds of objects, this paper shows that while implicit objects and quantity-objects behave like explicit canonical objects, non-canonical objects do not behave like canonical ones. This paper provides new evidence to support Zhang Niina Ning's (2018, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 36: 1395-1437) claim that a non-canonical object restricts the meaning of the verb, rather than saturates any argument of the verb. It also supports the internal argument analysis of post-verbal quantity expressions.

Studies in Polish Linguistics, 2014

We provide a semantic account of the free ordering of NP-internal elements in Chinese and argue that this provides evidence for the lack of DP in Chinese. We also extend this account to the Mandarin plural marker-men, tying the definiteness of-men phrases and its number/definiteness interaction to the classifier status of-men and the lack of DP in Chinese. We show that the binding properties of Chinese possessors also provide evidence for the no-DP analysis of Chinese. Finally, we propose a semantic account of certain differences in the order of NP-internal elements between Chinese and Serbo-Croatian, another language that lacks DP.

2015

This contribution examines the descriptive and resultative de-constructions in Mandarin Chinese, e.g. Wǒ pǎo-de hěn kuai ‘I run very fast’. There is a longstanding debate about this construction. The primary point of dispute concerns the main predicate: Is the first predicate the root of the sentence, i.e. pǎo-de ‘run’, or is the second predicate the root, i.e. kuai ‘fast’? We demonstrate here that from a dependency grammar (DG) perspective, the second predicate should be taken as the root. A number of diagnostics support this conclusion: 1) yes/no-questions with ma, 2) position of the negation bu, 3) omission, 4) placement of the adverb yě ‘also’, 5) ne-questions, and 6) modal insertion. The conclusion is important for the development of DG as applied to the syntax of Mandarin, since many basic questions about Mandarin sentence structure have not yet been examined from a DG perspective.

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Discourse Analysis

Research on iconicity and word order in Mandarin Chinese (henceforth MC) investigates the correlation between the sequence of linguistic elements in the sentence and the temporal, spatial, and causal characteristics of the events they describe. Such correlations are captured through a number of organizational principles, generally referred to in the literature as conceptual or cognitive word order principles. Among the most significant principles are the principle of temporal sequence, the principle of temporal scope and that of whole-before-part. Conceptual principles are of great interest for several reasons: first, they exhibit an iconic nature and show how and to what extent MC word order (henceforth WO) mirrors both universal and culture-specific conceptualizations of space, time and cause-effect logical relations. As such, they are easy to understand and remember, thus providing interesting applications to MC language instruction. Moreover, according to Tai (1985, 1989, 1993), Ho (1993), Hu (1995) and Loar (2011) among others, such principles bear great explanatory power in that they underlie several seemingly unrelated syntactic patterns and constructions. This chapter provides an introduction to organizational principles underlying MC word order, with a specific focus on conceptual (or cognitive) principles, such as the Principle of Temporal Sequence (PTS) and that of Whole-Before- Part (WBP). Specifically, it presents (i) the theoretical approach they are grounded in, (ii) their potential in language description, as compared to grammatical rules, and (iii) their applications to language acquisition and discourse analysis. These principles are shown to operate both at the micro-levels of phrase and clause and at higher levels of discourse and text. The discussion avails itself of natural language in use; unless otherwise specified, all examples are drawn from corpora, such as the PKU corpus of Modern Mandarin Chinese, Peking University or Ho’s corpus of spontaneous spoken texts (Ho 1993: 14-6).

2007

This paper is concerned with the problem of argument-function mismatch observed in the apparent subject-object inversion in Chinese consumption verbs, e.g., chi 'eat' and he 'drink', and accommodation verbs, e.g., zhu 'live' and shui 'sleep'. These verbs seem to allow the linking of <agent-SUBJ theme-OBJ> as well as <agent-OBJ theme-SUBJ>, but only when the agent is also the semantic role denoting the measure or extent of the action. The account offered is formulated within LFG's lexical mapping theory. Under the simplest and also the strictest interpretation of the one-to-one argument-function mapping principle (or the !-criterion), a composite role such as ag-ext receives syntactic assignment via one composing role only. One-to-one linking thus entails the suppression of the other composing role. Apparent subject-object inversion occurs when the more prominent agent role is suppressed and thus allows the less prominent extent role to dictate the linking of the entire ag-ext composite role. This LMT account also potentially facilitates a natural explanation of markedness among the competing syntactic structures.

It is generally assumed that the notion of finiteness is not applicable to Chinese due to the lack of grammatical tense/person agreement. Meanwhile, syntactic evidence suggests that the finiteness distinction can be made from predicate types in Chinese, but exactly how finiteness is defined and why predicate types may determine finiteness in Chinese remain obscure. The paper argues that the paradox of finiteness distinction in Chinese can be solved if we assume a parameterized version of Bianchi’s (2003) definition of finiteness based on logophoric anchoring. Specifically, due to the lack of tense or person agreement, Chinese employs ‘world’ as the primary anchoring device, and since world-anchoring is correlated to the propositional attitude of the matrix predicate, this gives us an explanation why the finiteness of Chinese is sensitive to predicate types. We further argue that infinitive control complements are embedded jussive clauses in Chinese, and the internal world-anchoring ...

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Counting and measuring are two different ways to get the quantity information of entities and eventualities. Measuring applies to mass-like entities and unbounded eventualities. Counting, however, requires individuation, and language -specifically, classification of the resultant individuals. The occurrence of classifiers signals the individuation, whereas the choice of a certain classifier signals the classification. In the verbal domain, duratives and repetitives are measuring and counting expressions, respectively. This study firstly presents the gender-like agreement properties of verbal classifiers in Chinese, which are p arallel to that of nominal classifiers. Secondly, I use complement -raising to account for a series facts with respect to duratives and repetitives in Chinese: their incompatibility with numeralinitial complements, their ability to separate idiom chunks, t heir possible postverbal positions, and the relevant argument scope patterns. Thirdly, I explain the cause of ambiguity in four thousand ships passed through the lock last year by a structural ambiguity: the numeral is either in construal w ith ships or with an event-individuation expression to form a repetitive. In the latter case, ships is a kind-denoting bare noun. The implicit event-individuation expression is represented by compound classifiers in Chinese. Finally, I argue that measuring and counting expressions to the left of the functional word de are nominal -external.

Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 2015

Although there have been various studies on the Chinese ba-construction, this article presents some unconventional views. Most studies do not treat ba as a verb. This article argues that ba is a verb, although it has some non-typical verbal properties. Firstly, the argument establishes that it is a verb based upon the "gradient" analysis, which has not been applied to ba before. Secondly, having been treated as a verb, ba shows special properties of its own such as marking subordination. Apart from this non-traditional view, ba is shown to be highly transitive, which is also a verbal feature. Different from previous analyses, this article argues that ba is a radial category showing various associated meanings. Finally, ba is shown to produce blending with other verb complements, such as the resultative construction, through its ability to create mental spaces.

Linguistics and Philosophy, 2004

A consensus about the interpretation of English indefinite NPs has begun to emerge in the recent literature since proposes that they may involve a choice function mechanism in their interpretation. However, there are diversified views concerning how the choice function mechanism should be executed; in particular there is a debate regarding which level(s) existential closure should apply to. This paper attempts to make a contribution to this debate. On the basis of the scopal behavior of Chinese existential polarity wh-phrases, we argue that Kratzer's (1998) and Matthewson's (1998) ideas that choice-functions can never be existentially closed at a site lower than the top cannot be correct. Nor is it right to allow free existential closure at every possible site as in . The behavior of Chinese existential polarity wh-phrases indicates that intermediate scope is possible for them but is not free everywhere. Intermediate scope for existential polarity wh-phrases and (indefinites headed by mou 'some') is blocked by certain quantifiers when the latter c-command the former. I show that this blocking effect can be accounted for by a condition very similar to a recent proposal made by Chierchia (2001), who also argues that free existential closure must be constrained. In fact, I will show that it is even possible to unify my data with that of Chierchia's. My findings in Chinese thus revive the possibility, rejected by , that the choice function mechanism may vary from language to language or possibly from indefinite NPs in one language to indefinite NPs in another language or even from one type of indefinite NP to another type of indefinite NP within the same language.

Studies in Language, 1997

The double-object construction has always been a controversial issue in linguistic theory. In Chinese we encounter an interesting and peculiar situation: both Mandarin and Cantonese have the dative construction with the indirect object (IO) introduced by a dative preposition (V + DO + Prep. + IO), but when the preposition is absent, the indirect object always precedes the direct object (DO)) in Mandarin (V + IO + DO), while the reverse order is predominant in Cantonese (V + DO + IO).