International Journal of Chinese Linguistics - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2019

Abstract

Mandarin wh-words such as shénme are wh-indeterminates, which can have interrogative interpretations (‘what’) or non-interrogative interpretations (i.e., ‘something’), depending on the context and licensors. For example, when diǎnr (‘a little’) appears right in front of a wh-word, the string can have either a wh-question or a declarative interpretation (henceforth, wh-declarative). Yang (2018) carried out a production study and the results showed that wh-questions and wh-declaratives have different prosodic properties. To investigate whether and when listeners make use of prosody to anticipate the clause type (i.e., question vs. declarative), we conducted a sentence perception study and an audio-gating experiment. Results of the perception study and the gating experiment show that (1) Participants can make use of prosody to differentiate the two clause types; (2) Starting from the onset of the first word of the target sentence (wh-question/wh-declarative), participants already demonstrate a preference for the clause type that was intended by the speaker. The current study also sheds light on the clausal typing mechanism in Mandarin (e.g., how to mark a clause as a wh-question) by providing evidence of the role of prosody in marking clause types in Mandarin.

Abstract

In this article, I demonstrate how past time-reference, modality, negation, conditional, and the causal relationship between the protasis and the apodosis work together to generate counterfactuality in Chinese, syntactically. I study two syntactic means that can help construe counterfactuality in Chinese. First, I study the case of the specialized complementizer yaobushi ‘if not for’ based on Ippolito and Su (2009) by arguing that the causal clausal relationship and the overt or covert modality are obligatory in yaobushi counterfactual; in particular, I resort to the inherent negative entailment of the modal adverb cai ‘not until’ that satisfies the exhaustive operator to account for the needed negation in cai apodosis. Second, I propose that a hypothetical conditional clause with a past time-reference guarantees past counterfactuality in Chinese. I extend the morphological past-tense exclusion operator for counterfactuality (Iatridou 2000) to a more general and more pragmatic past time-reference to include tenseless languages like Chinese. I also show the special typological status of past tense and past counterfactual.

Abstract

In Mandarin, predicative quantity adjectives (henceforth, Q-adjectives; e.g., duō ‘many’ and shăo ‘few ’; henceforth, predicative Q-adjectives), but not ordinary adjectives (e.g., cōngmi̇́ng ‘smart’), may influence the interpretation of the nominals they are predicates of; while the Mandarin counterpart of speaking of the students one taught, Zhangsan many can (and only can) mean that the students that Zhangsan taught are many, that of speaking of the students one taught, Zhangsan smart can only mean that Zhangsan, but not the student/s that Zhangsan taught, is/are smart. This paper is to show how this previously unnoticed contrast may be accounted for in current theories of degree syntax and semantics. The proposal is couched on Solt’s (2015) analysis of Q-adjectives, according to which measurement of cardinality is introduced via a covert functional head rather than the Q-adjectives per se. The main idea is that in Mandarin the covert functional head that introduces measurement of cardinality semantically encodes a contextually provided function from individuals to individuals. Crucially, although the content of this function is context-dependent, various syntactic and semantic factors may be at play.

Abstract

This article investigates the previously undocumented focus-sensitiveness of certain scope-bearing expressions in Mandarin, and argues that the syntactic effects of this property should be accommodated by a structure that involves multiple dependencies and inherited dependencies. At the empirical side, it is shown that in Mandarin, certain quantificational expressions as well as typical focusing adverbs have to occur at positions where they (i) c‑command and (ii) be as close as possible to the contrastive foci that they associate with. The similarity to the typical association-with-focus configurations is captured under a unified Agree analysis that incorporated previous variable-adjunction-site analysis for focusing particles in German, while the additional dependencies in these structures are accounted for by multiple Agree and feature inheritance. This analysis is compared with some alternative approaches, which do not have equal empirical coverage or require more complex theoretical assumptions.

Abstract

This paper examines the domain of the prosodic word in the Ningbo dialect. The goal of this paper is to provide a critical review of the studies on the prosodic word (PW) in various languages of the world, and to investigate the phonological phenomena within the domain formed by morpho-syntactic words in the Ningbo dialect as well as discussing the role that the prosodic word plays in the phonological rule application in the Ningbo dialect.

This paper provides a complete survey on various types of morpho-syntactic formation in the Ningbo dialect as well as examining the application of phonological phenomena with reference to the different types of morpho-syntactic words. It will show that the lexical tone sandhi rule (LTS) applies within the domain formed by the major types of morpho-syntactic words in Ningbo dialect. However, pure phonological information may also affect the application of LTS.

抽象

前人对“弄”字句已有大量著述，但我们基于若干口语和书面语语料库的考察发现，除了低度及物属性外，“弄”字句还有带补语结构和固化结构的显著特征。另外，“弄”字句整体呈现出论元结构简单、述语结构复杂的趋势。这两个趋势可以通过“弄”字句的非庄重性、负面情感意义、高度主观化等语用特征统一给出解释。在方法论上，本文试图为动词论元结构研究提供一个基于语料库的语用视角。

This article reviews Mastering the American Accent97814380008103