1887
Volume 7, Issue 1
  • ISSN 1877-7031
  • E-ISSN: 1877-8798
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Abstract

This study analyzes adverbial margins as a functional category in Chinese and, through the analysis, elucidates a graded distinction between subordination and coordination. Adverbial margins, which describe circumstances of situations in sentence nuclei, involve a varying of structural devices, including connectives, nominal forms, aspectually marked verbs, negation, and modality adverbs. The margin-nucleus pairs show varied degrees of subordination. This study takes an initial step towards substantiating and quantifying the gradient distinction. A mechanism of five parameters is proposed to rank margin-nucleus pairs in terms of tightness in clause linkage and subordination. The study contributes to the functional analysis of Chinese and the cross-linguistic discussions of the typology of subordination and coordination.

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2016-09-19
2025-02-19
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): adverbial; Chinese.; clause-linking; subordination
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