Language and Linguistics - Volume 19, Issue 2, 2018

This paper aims to investigate both Fagerli’s (2001) proposal that in serializing languages benefactive and malefactive constructions often involve the morpheme denoting ‘give’, and Radetzky & Smith’s (2010) proposal that East and South Asian languages often involve different morphemes or structures in expressing benefaction or malefaction. Checking the proposals against benefactive and malefactive constructions in Taiwan Southern Min (TSM) which involve optional benefactee and malefactee, this paper shows that both proposals find only partial support from TSM data. TSM uses the morpheme denoting ‘give’, i.e. hoo, in the malefactive construction involving optional malefactee, but not the benefactive construction involving optional benefactee, which involves the use of ka. Moreover, ka can also be used for introducing the malefactive. Even though the hoo malefactive construction and the ka benefactive construction have different structures, the constructions involving ka, no matter whether denoting benefaction or malefaction, have the same syntactic structure.

This paper presents a novel generalization of the reduplicant (henceforth red) placement in CV reduplication in Isbukun Bunun. It is shown that the variable red placements cannot be explained in terms of the presence of a PF marker or merely by the syllable number of the root, as assumed in previous studies. Rather, the variable red placements are argued to be simultaneously governed by the size and the syllable well-formedness of the root. The red is normally prefixed to the root; however, if onsetless red is generated under normal copying, the placement of the red shifts one syllable rightward, except for shorter (bimoraic) roots. Thus, the variable placements of the red are driven by a universal tendency for the red to be unmarked and the need for the P-Root to sustain a minimal size.

This paper argues that fragment question (FQ) in Mandarin Chinese is derived from topic movement and TP deletion, contributing to the growing body of evidence that sentence fragments are syntactically full clauses (Merchant 2004). Structurally, an FQ consists of a topic-like constituent followed by a particle ne, which functions as a topic marker and as a constituent question particle simultaneously. The fragment is argued to move to the SpecTopP rather than SpecFocP (Wei 2013), because FQ exhibits topic properties and respects island effects such as the complex NP island and the adjunct island. However, it is insensitive to islands such as the sentential subject island and left branch condition. We propose that the absence of island effect can be attributed to the pied-piping of the entire topic-like island to the SpecTopP. In addition, the proposed analysis not only captures the ineligible FQs caused by intervention effect within the passive structures but also the eligible FQs induced by preposition drop in the language.

Corresponding to the Ba construction (S Ba-OVC) in Mandarin, Cantonese prefers a strong SVCO word order, and the Shaoxing dialect adopts an SOVC variation. This paper makes a detailed cross-linguistic study on the structure and semantic interpretations of disposal NPs and highlights the role of the disposal NPs in the formation of disposal construction in the above three dialects. It suggests that the word order variations in disposal constructions among the Mandarin, Cantonese, and Shaoxing dialects result from the different options being adopted to make the object NPs conform to the so called definiteness constraint of a disposal NP, namely, definite, specific, or generic.

Sin¹ 先 as a function word in contemporary Cantonese encodes a number of grammatical and pragmatic meanings. As its most prominent feature in syntax, it predominantly occurs in the postverbal position while indicating the meaning of ‘first’. This paper explores the emergence of the postverbal sin¹ 先 ‘first’ in Cantonese. We first examine the word order typology on the element for ‘first’ in the languages and dialects of southern coastal China. In this linguistic area, the postverbal elements for ‘first’ in Chinese dialects are contact-induced by Tai-Kadai and Hmong-Mien languages; whereas sin¹ 先 ‘first’ in the mainstream Cantonese shows a stronger tendency to be placed in the postverbal position than its counterparts in other Chinese dialects. We then discuss the word order and semantic changes of sin¹ 先 from 1820s to 1960s based on Cantonese historical materials. Besides the pressure of language contact, the formation of the postverbal sin¹ 先 ‘first’ has been further triggered by the semantic motivation to formally differentiate the ‘precedent-subsequent’ polysemy within sin¹ 先 itself. In short, the emergence of the postverbal sin¹ 先 ‘first’ in Cantonese has been a two-stage process, dually driven by external and internal causes, respectively.