Chinese Syntax

In this paper, I argue that A refers to Iº in Mandarin A-not-A questions, which can either be a modal, an aspect marker, a raised verb, a verb with aspect suffixation, or a preposition. I also argue t hat the forma tion of A-not-A questions follows a suc cessive cyclic derivation; i.e. I º moves to Neg º to form the +Q tem plate [A-not], with its trace undeleted for not being a strict head movement, and then [ A-not] moves to Cº for the surface structure. My analy sis also offers a sy ntactic account for why A-meiyou-A is ungrammatical and why VO-not-VO is not attested in A-not-A questions.

This study attempts to account for the argument-adjunct asymmetry of Sluicing in Mandarin Chinese. Such an asymmetry is empirically demonstrated by a language-particular phenomenon, so-called shi-support, which is also the last resort (Chomsky, 1995a) of our linguistic mechanism. In the current related literature, shi-support is obligatory for wh-arguments but optional for wh-adjuncts . However, I argue that at the PF level shi-support is even optional for wh-arguments; t h a t i s , i t i s o n l y n e e d e d i n t h e d e r i v a t i o n a t t h e L F l e v e l . My a n a l y s i s i s c r u c i a l l y b a s e d o n C L M' s (1995) insightful analysis of LF Copying Theory. Departing from their analysis in crucial respects, however, I argue that a covert wh-movement also takes place simultaneously with the operation of copying the antecedent IP. For reasons of economy, such a non-overt movement is preferred and is of the least efforts (Procrastinate). In addition, evidence from shi-support argues that Sluicing in Mandarin Chinese prefers LF copying rather than PF deletion. To sum up, shi-support is compulsory for wh-arguments in that the ECP (Empty Category Principle) requirement must be satisfied at the LF level owning to the int e r v e n i n g " b a r r i e r s " ( C h o ms k y , 1 9 8 6 ) .

On Argument-Adjunct Asymmetry of Sluicing in Mandarin Chinese* Li-Chi Lee Chen Graduate Institute of Linguistics National Tsing Hua ... and (2): (1) a. Zhangsan xihuan shei (wh-argument) Zhangsan like who 'WhodoesZhangsanlike?' b. Zhangsan xihuan Meili Zhangsan like ...

The present paper attempts (1) to clarify some of the problems involved in current theories of discourse analysis, and (2) to re-interpret the concept of '' paragraph '' as a necessary prerequisite for an inquiry into certain functional domains of discourse processes, namely those dealing with the mapping problem of discourse production / comprehension. What follows is thus primarily a formulation of problems, accompanied by a survey of previous studies on the paragraph in such disciplines as composition, anthropology, psychology, and linguistics. These discussions shall be the preliminary to our subsequent research. 1. In the study of discourse structure, several levels of analysis are generally recognized. According to Kintsch (1985: 231), they are '' the linguistic parsing of the text, followed by the construction of atomic propositions that represent its meaning elements; next, these n,eaning elements are organized into a coherent textbase, which represents the full meaning of the text; from this textbase, the macrostructure of the text is derived, representing its essence or gist." Such are the " representations of the text proper ", and this process " results in the construction of a situation model, which is not a representation of the text itself but of the situation referred to by the text." (ibid.

The journal is being made more researcher-friendly with every issue. Every paper is Turnitin-run, eradicating the ever present fear of plagiarism. Moreover, since the journal puts its premium on research, you will find neatly defined sectioning pertaining to literature review, methodology (data collection and analysis) and conclusion. There is no complicated mesh-work of information. This issue like always consists of varied and Pakistan-related research. Dr. Nighat Ahmad constructs an interesting research on a post-colonial novel by Mr. Ahmad Ali. Research on code switching at NUML has been carried out by Dr. Nighat Sultana and Mr. Ajmal Gulzar which I hope would be useful to teachers and scholars alike at Masters level.. This issue also carries a paper on ecofeminism which again is a topic we can easily relate to in Pakistan.Dr. Naz Sultana presents a case for incorporating media technology in ELT.In addition to this, Dr. Shaheena A. Bhatti, who has gone to the USA to do her post doctorate, talks about the literary output of an important but relatively unknown(in this part of the world) native Indian-American writer Sherman Alexie. Three Chinese papers have been added to give a new depth to the journal. The university is the only one of its kind that offers courses in the Chinese language at all levels starting from the foundation going up to the Masters. The university also houses the Confucius Center. There is a sizeable group of students studying and doing research in the Chinese language. The interesting point is that features of this allimportant language are discussed in the framework of the English language which enables it even for a non-Chinese speaker to relate to them. The editorial team hopes that like always, the journal would prove to be useful to researchers as well as other readers.

As a variant of Copy Deletion (CD), partial/scattered deletion (Fanselow and Ćavar 2002, et seq.) has been adopted to handle different discontinuous phrasal constituents in both nominal and verbal domains (e.g., left branch extraction, as in Bošković (2001), Bošković (2015), Pereltsvaig (2008), Bondarenko and Davis (2021); and predicate fronting, as in Bentzen (2008), van Urk (2019), Larson (2020)). In this paper, we propose that partial deletion is not restricted to phrasal constituents but also heads (i.e., partial deletion at word-level), based on new evidence from discontinuous predicates in Cantonese. The empirical foundations of this paper concern the observation that a disyllabic verb in Cantonese can appear in discontinuous form when it takes verbal suffixes (Chan and Cheung 2021). Substantially, while a verb suffix (referred to as x) canonically follows a verb, it can also intervene between the two syllables of the verb (referred to as A and B), leading to a discontinuous s...

The present study is mainly concerned with the nature of the demonstrative shì 是 as the historical source of the copula shì. Tracing the development of shì in bronze inscriptions from the 11th to 3rd centuries bce and comparing the patterns of change against two purportedly contemporary texts, Shī jīng 詩經 and Shàng shū 尚書, it argues that shì is not a typical demonstrative in origin because it only occurs pronominally and is strongly associated with the structural expression of focus in its early stage of development. On the basis of these observations, shì is analyzed as a special demonstrative that combines anaphoric and focalizing force to highlight and contrast a constituent that has been introduced into the discourse. It is then compared with the expressions wéi zhī  唯之and huì zhī 惠之 with the same function in the Shang oracle-bone inscriptions (13th–11th centuries BCE). The investigation of whether shì is derived from wéi zhī only finds evidence indicating a morphological relationship with zhī, while the etymological link with wéi remains speculative. In conclusion, this study claims that the focalizing force of shì is important in answering the question of why it is the only demonstrative evolving into a copula. The observed development of shì confirms that the origination of copulas is often related to the morphosyntactic expression of features of information structure.

This is a follow-up study on the nature of shí as a demonstrative in the light of new evidence from the recently published Anhui University, or Anda, Shi jing manuscript. In this paper, the author summarizes all the evidence that led to her previous analysis of shí as a case of writing an "old" demonstrative, zhī , with a "new" graph created during the Warring States period (5th-3rd C. BCE) and argues how the textual variant, , which she claims to be read as *dǝ, in the Anda Shi jing manuscript, supports and completes her previous theory of shí , a demonstrative form until the discovery of the Anda manuscript had only been seen in received texts.

This article 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 3agent-SUBJ theme-OBJ4 as well as 3agent-OBJ theme-SUBJ4, but only when the agent is also the semantic role denoting the measure or extent of the action. The account o¤ered is formulated within LFG's lexical mapping theory. Under the simplest and also the strictest interpretation of the argument-function mapping principle (or the y-criterion), a composite role such as ag-ext receives syntactic assignment via one composing role only; the second composing role must be suppressed. Apparent subject-object inversion occurs when in the competition between the two composing roles, agext, the agent loses out and is suppressed. This account also facilitates a natural explanation of markedness among the competing syntactic structures.

This paper provides an analysis of the Cantonese post-verbal particle can1. We argue that can1 is a resultative particle encoding the meaning of ‘a small degree’. It is only compatible with (i) verbs that entail a specific resulted state of the theme argument and (ii) verbs that encode a potential change of the theme argument (Beavers, 2011, 2013). Assuming that change of state verbs involve a property scale (Hay et al., 1999), we propose that can1 makes the property scale bounded by providing an end-point. This endpoint, however, is not precise. It consists of a range of values on the lower end of the scale.

In Chinese linguistics, there has been a long-term interest in the many uses of 有 yǒu. However, a number of these studies limit the functions of 有 yǒu only to a particular period (i.e. the Archaic or Modern period). Moreover, explanations as to why 有 yǒu lost its dominance and was substituted by other words is rarely given. Thus, this paper will synthesize the key interpretations on the variety of functions of 有 yǒu during their development from the Archaic to Modern Chinese periods, and provide explanations for its semantic and syntactic characteristics. In addition, this paper also supports Hopper and Traugott (2003)'s view that during the process of grammaticalization, a content word can shift its function to be a grammatical one. To better our understanding of the historical development of 有 yǒu, I first provide a summary of previous studies. Li and Thompson (1981) point out that there are quite a few languages in the world, including Mandarin Chinese that use the same verb to express "possession" and "existence". Teng's (1973) and that observation on the negatives and aspects of Chinese can support this claim. In Teng's article, he explains that in the French, Spanish and Japanese languages, the existential verb 有 yǒu asserts the existence 10 公 Gōng here refers to 莊公 Zhuānggōng "Zhuanggong" 11 'POSS' stands for 'Possessive adjective' 12 'PAR' stands for 'Particle'

We argue that the contrastive dislocation to the low peripheral position in Mandarin Chinese does not target phrase markers, like TopicP or FocusP, contra recent proposals that attempt to extend the cartographic theory to the low IP-area. We argue that such dislocations are best analyzed as PF movements, which display the total reconstruction effect and do not affect the LF interface. We show that the contrastive dislocation to the low periphery in Mandarin Chinese is subject to the same PF licensing condition found in the Object Shift construction in Scandinavian. Our analysis thus claims that the low periphery is not a part of the narrow syntax (unlike the left periphery). The templatic nature of the low periphery explains why it is more restricted across languages and is prone to linguistic variation. *This project is supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan (MOST 107-2410-H-001-063-MY2). Earlier versions of the paper were presented in GLOW in Asia in 2012 (Mie University), FoSS-10 in 2014 (National Kinmen University), and at Academia Sinica. We thank the audience in those venues for their constructive comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for raising many insightful questions and helping us to improve the quality of the paper. Of course, all errors and mistakes in this paper remain our responsibilities entirely.

Several functions have been proposed for the colloquial discourse particle like. This paper examines possible evidence for like as a focus marker. While this hypothesis seems plausible, it has been posited with insufficient definition or detail regarding the type of focus involved. It is also not clear how this aligns with other likely functions proposed for this discourse particle: for example, as a hedge marker or an approximator. This paper reports on a preliminary empirical study with small sets of conversational data of spoken colloquial American English. Its syntactic patterns and pragmatic usage suggest that like is used in a manner comparable to that of additive focus markers, exemplifiers, and other discourse markers. In such cases, it can function as an additive focus marker of indirect contrast, in addition to its well attested use as a hedge marker. Sentence-initial it's like may have similar properties. Analyzing like as an additive marker allows for reconciliation of its various proposed functions by treating it as a multifunctional marker. The findings also indicate many avenues for further research.

Aoun & Li (1993) discuss an interesting phenomenon—the association between focus particles and interrogative wh-phrases (F-WH association, henceforth) in Mandarin. Specifically, it refers to the phenomenon that in a wh-question, a focus particle must be associated with a wh-phrase, as in (1a-c). In these sentences, the wh-phrases occupy positions with which the focus particles are able to associate (details to be discussed in section 2) (in this paper, a focus particle and its focused associate are set in boldface and underlined, respectively).

The traditional observation that Chinese wh-arguments do not exhibit wh-island effects may be only apparent. With new evidence from “how-many” phrases, it is demonstrated that Chinese has wh-island effects even with wh-arguments. What nullifies such effects is in fact the disguise of D-linkedness. Although the lack of wh-island effects seems to pattern Chinese wh-construals with Japanese ones, further tests show that these two languages are still different with respect to strong island effects, (anti-)crossing effects, and multiple wh-interpretations. The finding leads to the need to reinvestigate the mechanisms underlying the scope-taking wh-elements of wh-in-situ languages on the one hand, and those triggering wh-island effects on the other.

'why 1 did John say t 1 that no one read that book?'. This is irrelevant for our discussion since the Intervention Effect is at stake for (18a) only when the NPI scopes over the LF-trace of way. Note also that (18a) lacks the reading available for (18b), where the LF-trace of way takes scope over amwuto and negation. See note 16 and section 6.1 for implications of this fact.

(E. Butler). 1 Laycock (1969, fn. 36) contrasts the term 'ludling', introducing it with the more general term 'play-language', which he finds "too broad". For him, a ludling involves a "systematic deformation of ordinary language". As evidenced throughout this paper, the Doggo language game certainly falls within Laycock's definition of a ludling. A reviewer notes that playful language is generally not systematic, while language games are. As shown throughout this paper, Doggo exhibits the properties of a language game.

Chinese has been widely recognised as a classic example of a numeral-licensing classifier language, where the presence of a classifier is obligatory for overt quantification of nouns. This paper presents new data from Mandarin and Hong Kong Cantonese (HKC) to show that the need of classifiers for quantification is not always that absolute. Systematic variation has been found with an extended range of numerals examined (numerals larger than three), and a wider coverage of nouns in terms of animacy. The findings present a consistent pattern that HKC has a stricter requirement for classifiers in enumeration as bare common nouns are not definite in HKC, and it lacks the alternative strategies found in Mandarin.

Corpus-Based Research on Chinese Language and Linguistics, 7-16 of English-Chinese parallel corpora, translational Chinese corpora, Chinese dialects databases and corpora of ethnic languages in China. The great advantage of corpora lies in the fact that they offer access to large amounts of authentic, naturally occurring linguistic data produced by a variety of speakers or writers, thus providing more robust, statistically significant foundations for linguistic accounts and analyses. There is now considerable emphasis on the reliability of linguistic materials: several scholars stress the need for a shift to a more empirical mode of investigation, as rigorous theoretical advances need to be "grounded in solid empirical data" (Jing-Schmidt 2013, 1). A further advantage is that corpus queries may also reveal the statistical relevance of a specific linguistic phenomenon, e.g. a lexical item or a grammatical pattern, as well as possible changes or developments of its behaviours over time. Moreover, corpus queries may also allow searching for significant interactions between domain variables (Wallis, Nelson 2001). Finally, these tools may help reveal new words or patterns that were previously unobservable or, else, regarded as non-existent or marginal. In short, corpora allow qualitative and quantitative, synchronic and diachronic investigations of the language, providing factual, frequency, and interaction evidence for linguistic analyses (Wallis 2019). They not only offer new insights within the core subfields of linguistics-including syntax, semantics and lexicography, pragmatics and language use, information structure-but also provide precious material for disciplines such as language acquisition, with the analysis of learners' corpora and interlanguage development, or sociolinguistics, with synchronic and diachronic studies on language and society, socio-linguistic comparison, as well as the development of buzzwords in social media and the Internet. The past decade has seen the rapid development of corpus-based research in many aspects of Chinese language and linguistics. One of the most popular types of research is the compilation of frequency character/word lists (Xu 2015): after Li Jinxi's A Statistical Analysis of Basic Chinese Vocabulary (1922), lexical studies received increasing interest, with many scholars applying corpus tools to all aspects of lexicography, including selecting words to be included in a dictionary on a statistical basis, identifying word senses, ordering of polysemous and homograph items, as well as determining word classes and singling out illustrative examples of words' uses (see McEnery, Xiao 2016, 442). Among the most recent lexical frequency and word list projects, there are the latest national Chinese character list, i.e. the 通用规范汉字表 Tōngyòng Guīfàn Hànzì Biǎo (A General Service List of Chinese Characters), released in 2013, and Xiao, Rayson and McEnery's (2009) A Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese (see McEnery, Xiao 2016 for a review). Corpus-based researches on second language acquisition and interlanguage development have also been increasing over the last couple of decades, with early projects at ing sources: the 新世纪新词语大词典 Xin shiji xinciyu da cidian (New Century Comprehensive Dictionary of Neologisms), the Leiden Weibo Corpus, and the Buzzwords section of the Shanghai Daily. After describing the three word-formation patterns, the paper describes their evolution over time, and the semantic shift and meaning generalisation characterising their grammaticalization path. The study also proposes an analysis of productivity measures for the three wordformation patterns and discusses their diffusion in Chinese.

This paper compares the two postverbal elements in Cantonese:-faan1 and-haa5. In previous research, some scholars believe that-faan1 is a tone-softener (or Downtoner), and the derivation is based on the usage of positive evaluative marker-faan1. Another focus of this paper,-haa5, is a verbal classifier to count the occurrence of an action. Here, I believe the tonesoftening function of-haa5 is derived from its delimitative or tentative reading, which is like the Mandarin-yixia and a particle tsi̍ t-ē in Taiwanese Southern Min. The examples of the two downtoners are shown below. 1) Cing daaigaa tai faan1 zigei yiu zou ge je. (V+-faan1) '(In a soft tone) Please take a look at what you have to do.'

Please contact BLS regarding any further use of this work. BLS retains copyright for both print and screen forms of the publication. BLS may be contacted via http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/bls/. The Annual Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society is published online via eLanguage, the Linguistic Society of America's digital publishing platform. BARRY C.-Y. YANG Chinese is the so-called isolating language or sometimes it is termed the "cool language" (Huang 1984) with respect to agreement and movement. In this paper, I would like to discuss three apparently unrelated phenomena and try to subsume them into general conditions on agreement and movement. The first phenomenon is the "discourse-drop". That is, while on the one hand Chinese allows its subjects and objects to be omitted as in (1), unlike English in (2), on the other hand it does not employ rich morphological marking to restore its missing elements as in (3), unlike Italian in (4). (1) a. lai le. come Perf. '[He] has come.' b. Ta mai le. he buy Perf. 'He has bought [it]. (2) a. *Has come. b. *He has bought. (3) (wo/ni/ta/women/nimen/tamen) shuo I/you.sg/he/we/you.pl/they speak Barry C.-Y. Yang (4) (io) parlo 'I speak' (tu) parli 'you.sg speak' (egli) parla 'he/she speak' (noi) parliamo 'we speak' (voi) parlate 'you.pl speak' (essi) parlano 'they speak' The second phenomenon is the-construal. That is, while English overtly moves its-items to the sentence-initial position to take the scope as in (5), Chinese generally does not (6). (5) Whom i does he like i ? (6) Ta xihuan shei? he like whom 'Whom does he like?' Unless under certain special context, e.g., D-linking or contrastive focus, can Chinese-items undergo overt movement as in (7) (Wu 1999). (7) a. Shei i /Na-ge-ren i [ ni zui xihua i ]? which-Cl-person you most like 'Who/Which person do you like most?' b. Shenme-dongxi i /Na-dao-cai i [ta mei chi i ]? What-thing which-Cl-dish he not eat 'What/Which dish didn't he eat?'

Kayne (2022) has proposed that the asymmetry of syntax be built into the fundamental operation of Merge itself. This squib reviews some of his proposals and supporting evidence. Departing from Kayne, this squib hypothesized that the asymmetric patterns mainly lie in the functional domain of syntax, and the lexical domain may remain symmetric either within a language or cross-linguistically. The Functional Asymmetry Hypothesis (FAH) is supported by the global symmetry of the VO/OV word order, the commutative conjunction structures in the lexical domain, and the free ordering of event-internal adverbs. If the observation is on the right track, it suggests that the asymmetry of syntax, while empirically robust, cannot be entirely reduced to the operation Merge.

We argue that functional categories, on a par with silent nouns (Kayne 2005), may exist in silent/unpronounced forms in syntax. Based on modifiers in the nominal domains, we provide a diagnostic for such silent projections. Our hypothesis is evidenced by two apparent NP-modifiers: whole/zheng and same/tong. We show that they should not be analyzed as modifiers of NP, but modifiers of nominal functional categories. The former modifier whole/zheng provides evidence that English, like Chinese, should have a projection of classifier, but unlike Chinese, such a classifier projection is unpronounced. The latter modifier same/tong indicates that Chinese can also have a silent definite article. The analysis therefore supports the hypothesis of uniform syntax.

The traditional observation that Chinese wh-arguments do not exhibit wh-island effects may be only apparent. With new evidence from “how-many” phrases, it is demonstrated that Chinese has wh-island effects even with wh-arguments. What nullifies such effects is in fact the disguise of D-linkedness. Although the lack of wh-island effects seems to pattern Chinese wh-construals with Japanese ones, further tests show that these two languages are still different with respect to strong island effects, (anti-)crossing effects, and multiple wh-interpretations. The finding leads to the need to reinvestigate the mechanisms underlying the scope-taking wh-elements of wh-in-situ languages on the one hand, and those triggering wh-island effects on the other.

The Results of the Research Chapters 2 through 4 presented the underlying theories and assumptions that this research is based on, and Chap. 5 described the methodology used. This chapter now presents the results relating to six Sentence-final particles (SFPs) that were found to have English intonational equivalents. These six SFPs divide into three pairs of related particles: the evidential particles lo1 and aa1maa3; the question particles me1 and aa4; and the "only" particles zaa3 and ze1. The chapter is divided into three main sections, each of which is devoted to one pair of SFPs. 1 Each of the chapter's three sections is organized as follows. An SFP's meaning is described, and its Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) explication is presented before showing and discussing the data related to its English equivalent. The data comprise the Cantonese-to-English oral translations and their accompanying F 0 contours. The target utterances that were translated by the participants are shown in bold within each dialogue. The English translations shown for the target utterances represent the most commonly used wording from the oral translations provided by the ambilingual participants; all other English translations within the dialogues are mine. Based on the fact that each SFP translated into English as the same form of intonation by multiple ambilingual translators in multiple contexts, it is assumed that the explication given to each SFP also applies to its English intonational equivalent. To test this assumption, the explication that defines an SFP and its English equivalent is tested against the linguist examples of the SFP that were presented from the literature and from the data. Each of the three subsections then ends with a summary and analysis that contrasts that section's two related SFPs with their English equivalents. 1 Versions of the study on lo1 and aa1maa3 discussed in Sect. 6.1 are also published in Wakefield (2010, 2012a); versions of the study on me1 and aa4 discussed in Sect. 6.2 are also published in Wakefield (2010, 2014); and a version of the study on ze1 and zaa3 discussed in Sect. 6.3 will be published in Wakefield (in press).

Cantonese linguists have said that Cantonese sentence-final particles (SFPs) express the same kinds of meanings that are expressed by intonation in languages such as English, yet apparently no study has ever systematically attempted to discover whether any SFPs have English intonational equivalents. This study identifies the English intonational counterpart to the SFP lo1 by looking at the pitch contours of Cantonese-to-English audio translations, which were provided by four Cantonese/English native bilingual participants. Based on the data, it is concluded that the English equivalent of lo1 is a high-falling pitch contour. A definition using the natural semantic metalanguage is formulated to define lo1, and native English-speaker judgments indicate that this same definition also defines the meaning of lo1's English equivalent. Examples are given to demonstrate that this definition succeeds at defining either lo1 or its English equivalent in any context within which they are used. It is proposed that this lo1-equivalent pitch contour is a floating tone morpheme in the English lexicon. Linguists have long debated whether or not any forms of intonation have context-independent meanings. This study offers empirical evidence in support of the argument that they do. Keywords: Cantonese; discourse particle; floating tone; evidential marker; discourse intonation; natural semantic metalanguage metalanguage (NSM), and native English-speaker judgments are collected as a form of evidence to show that lo1 and its English equivalent have the same meaning. It is taken as a working hypothesis that lo1 and its English counterpart are equivalents with regard to function, meaning, and grammatical category, i.e., that they are both discourse particles that function to link the sentence to the discourse in the same way. This paper is organized as follows. The next section describes the forms and functions of intonation and SFPs, and explains the three-way relationship among intonation, lexical tones and SFPs. Section 3 introduces the natural semantic metalanguage and proposes an NSM definition for lo1. Section 4 describes the research design and methodology. Then, based on the Cantonese-to-English translations, section 5 describes the form of lo1's English equivalent. Section 6 demonstrates that the NSM definition is able to accurately describe the uses of lo1 and it English equivalent in any context where they appear. Section 7 explains the polysemy of lo1 and the final section provides a summary and conclusion of the study. Throughout the paper, the term SFP refers to Cantonese SFPs. 2. Intonation and discourse particles Cheung (1986:251) said it is "beyond doubt" that lexical tones, SFPs, and intonation are interrelated because lexical tones and intonation both share the same form, while SFPs and 4 intonation share the same functions. To help readers better understand this three-way relationship among SFPs, intonation and lexical tones, this section first describes the forms of intonation and lexical tones, and then the forms of discourse particles. After that the overlapping functions of SFPs and intonation are described in order to explain why the complex lexical tone system of Cantonese has resulted in its using segmental particles to express the types of meanings that are expressed by intonation in English. 2.1. The forms of intonation and lexical tones Intonational forms consist of pitch, length and loudness. Pitch is considered by linguists to be the most important of the three, followed by length and then loudness (Chun, 2002;

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 construc- tions 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 func- tions 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.

1. Introduction The relegation of syntactic variation to lexical features under the Minimalist Program has led to a growing awareness that syntactic change should be characterized in the same way: by changes in the discrete features of individual lexical items. This insight has given rise to the following distinctively minimalist typology of syntactic change: (1) a. Loss or gain of a feature driving movement (Roberts 1993, 1997). b. Grammaticalization as shift " up the tree " to a functional category (Roberts & Roussou 1999) c. Reanalysis as relabelling: lexical items change categorial or projection [+max, +min] features under preservation of hierarchical (c-command) relations (Whitman 2000). The objective of this paper is to apply this typology to several well-known examples of syntactic change in Chinese. We show that earlier analyses exaggerate the scope of syntactic change in the long-documented history of Chinese languages. The changes that are in fact attested can be...

Ebben a tanulmányban az (1) példához hasonló, a nem mintha szerkezet szervezte diskurzusokat elemzem. (1) Nem unatkozom mostanában. Nem mintha bármikor is szoktam volna, de az elmúlt időszakban megsokszorozódtak a tennivalóim. Állításaimat a Google Blogkereső (a továbbiakban: GBK) alkalmazásával elérhető, a beszélt nyelvhez közel álló blogok, valamint a Magyar Történeti Korpusz (a továbbiakban: MTK) formális és szépirodalmi szövegeire alapozom. Az adatok áttekintése, elrendezése és elemzése során a következő két főbb eredményre jutottam: (i) Szerkezetét tekintve a nem mintha egy redukált összetett mondat, mely a következő formákban valósulhat meg: nem azért mondom/írom/stb., mintha > nem azért, mintha > nem mintha

The traditional observation that Chinese wh-arguments do not exhibit wh-island effects may be only apparent. With new evidence from “how-many” phrases, it is demonstrated that Chinese has wh-island effects even with wh-arguments. What nullifies such effects is in fact the disguise of D-linkedness. Although the lack of wh-island effects seems to pattern Chinese wh-construals with Japanese ones, further tests show that these two languages are still different with respect to strong island effects, (anti-)crossing effects, and multiple wh-interpretations. The finding leads to the need to reinvestigate the mechanisms underlying the scope-taking wh-elements of wh-in-situ languages on the one hand, and those triggering wh-island effects on the other.

This paper revisits intervention effects in Mandarin Chinesewhy-questions. I present new data showing that the ability for quantifiers to induce intervention hinges upon their monotonicity and their ability to be interpreted as topics. I then develop a semantic account that correlates topicality with monotone properties. Furthermore, I propose thatwhy-questions in Chinese are idiosyncratic in thatwhydirectly merges at a high scope position that stays above a propositional argument. Combining the semantic idiosyncrasies ofwhy-questions with the wide scope behaviors of topicality, I conclude that my account explains a wide range of intervention phenomena in terms of interpretation failure.

Taking effect immediately following Tunisia’s independence, Arabization has achieved mixed results with Arabic institutionally empowered but still competing with French. In fact, when examining the linguistic landscape, this monolingual policy is flouted both in terms of the bilingual Arabic-French Street signage but also challenged by people’s preferences. This paper examines inconsistencies between Arabic as the ‘language of the state’ (government-decreed), and the omnipresence of other ‘languages in the state’ (observed in representation and practice) in Tunisia. Street signage artefacts and attitudinal data also illustrate how language policies are responded to and experienced by Tunisians. Data consists of different types of private inscriptions and public signs, governmental decrees, as well as attitudinal surveys and interviews. The juxtaposition of urban signs with the official policy on multilingualism provides an illustrative account of the complexities of the linguistic s...

The Mandarin quantificational adverb dou 都 is well-known for its versatility: it occurs in a wide variety of constructions, and has a wide range of s emantic and pragmatic contributions to the meaning of the clause it occurs in, ranging from un iversal quantification, through even- type focusing, to clearly pragmatic-attitudinal functions. This pa per targets a relatively narrow segment of this wid e spectrum: those use of dou where (i) it is used with universal quantification al force, and/but (ii) the linguistic expression often associated with its qua ntification domain in the literature appears to its right in the clause, as opposed to the much more usual s cenario of its associate taking a position to its left . It is shown that the alleged associates to its ri ght are in fact not its true associates syntactically, at least not in the manner that its leftward associates are: (i) the ’personal pronoun’ construction in fact complies with the LC, making u se of covert elements; (i...

Sao in Modern Vietnamese is primarily interpreted as either how or why. We argue it is first and foremost a what-element. Sao's omnipresence in adverbial formatives is attributable to the tendency for how and why to be morpho-syntactically built upon what in the language. This supports Tsai's (1999b) unselective binding of nominal wh-phrases and a wh-adverb/wh-nominal 1 distinction. We further tease apart various sao-related wh-constituents in syntactic-interpretative terms before offering a critique of three accounts on strategies for licensing Vietnamese whquestions and on the status of vậy and thế 2 as binding licensers.

Chinese language arts: The role of language and linguistic devices in literary and artistic expressions. In Chu-Ren Huang, Zhuo Jing-Schmidt, and Barbara Meisterernst (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Applied Chinese Linguistics. (pp. 237-255). New York and London: Routledge. Pre-published version provided to meet funding guidelines. Refer to published version for final version.

The primary purpose of this study is to determine the characteristics of verbal clause and topicalization in Siladang Language. This study is based on the theoretical framework of language typology in regard with the difference between the language that accentuates the subjects with the language that accentuates the topics as what has been suggested by Li and Thompson (1976). The clause structure of the Siladang language consists of clause structures with nonverbal and verbal predicates. The first may appear in the forms of clauses with adjectival, nominal, numeral, and prepositional phrase predicates. The second may have intransitive, ditransitive, and extended transitive. Meanwhile, the third the nature of subject refers to the links between an agent and its topic. Agents become the grammatical roles which are based on semantic roles, while topics are primarily concerned with pragmatic functions. The discussion of pragmatic functions is intended to find out whether Siladang Language is categorized as either the subject prominent language group or the topic prominent language.

Based on the caused eventuality, causation can be subdivided into the causation of activity and causation of change of state. By analyzing how causatives are expressed in European Portuguese and Mandarin Chinese, this study shows that these two languages exhibit quite many differences in expressing causation of change of state. We observe that many Portuguese verbs that intrinsically involve causative meanings do not have Chinese equivalence in simplex verb forms-their Chinese counterparts may take complex forms, including a construction we call Causative Resultative V-Vs (CR V-Vs). Differences are also found in the derivational process: whereas anticausation plays a significant role in Portuguese, causation is the primary process in Chinese. We attribute the contrast to different semantics of verb roots in the two languages: Portuguese exhibits plenty of result roots that can intrinsically express caused-result meanings; in contrast, Chinese roots tend to denote either a pure activity or a pure (change of) state, and a causative structure is needed to express causative meanings.

In Chengdu Chinese, degree intensifiers for APs/VPs are attested to pair with three different types of sentence-final particles (SFPs), i.e., the FinP-level, the FocP-level and the ExclP-level SFPs, which function to complete a sentence, encode a focus and express exclamation. In our analysis, a degree intensifier projects a DegP, which pairs with one of the three sentential projections, viz., FinP, FocP and ExclP. This pairing is motivated by feature checking, as intensifiers contain the uninterpretable semantic features of [+Fin], [+Foc] or [+Excl], which need to be checked by sentential projections. Due to the inalienable sentential functions, intensifiers are barred from occurring in any kind of non-finite contexts. Furthermore, FinP and FocP are within the vP-domain, whereas ExclP is in the CP domain. Thus, ExclP-type intensifiers, unlike FinP-type and FocP-type intensifiers, defy relativization. This study of associating degree intensification with sentential functions not onl...