Language and Linguistics - Volume 26, Issue 1, 2025

Abstract

Over the past decade, the documentation of Gyalrongic languages has shed light on grammatical phenomena which were poorly understood in Tangut, a language of critical importance in the field of Sino-Tibetan comparative linguistics. This paper provides an explanation for the last remaining unelucidated verbal alternation in Tangut (-ɨ¹/-i²), which, as I will demonstrate, encodes a non-past/past distinction. By doing so, it also gives fresh arguments for placing Tangut and the Horpa languages together within one clade. Finally, methodologically speaking, it offers an example of grammatical reconstruction from above, i.e. employing sister languages to better understand the grammar of an extinct language through their common ancestor, revealing a rare example of complex distributional retention uncorrelated with regular phonetic correspondences.

Abstract

This paper presents a typological study of the coding strategies of alternative questions (AQs) in Chinese and its linguistic neighbours in Asia. An AQ is a type of question in which the speaker asks the hearer to decide which of two or more alternatives holds. Previous studies have noted that some languages use a general disjunctive conjunction to connect the alternatives while others use an AQ-dedicated conjunction, like haishi 還是 in Mandarin. Our investigation finds that this latter kind of conjunction is preferred in southern varieties of Chinese, while some northern Chinese dialects tend to drop the conjunction and add a modal particle to each alternative. The divergence reflects a more general picture of AQ-type distribution across and beyond East Asia, where languages in the north and the west with OV order prefer to add a question marker to each alternative without using conjunctions, while languages in the east and the south with VO order prefer to use a conjunction and allow the items to be non-question-marked. In the transition zone from OV to VO, two atypical AQ types emerge in Sinitic languages. One type uses modal particles or the copula verb shi 是 as the connector; the other type simply juxtaposes the alternatives without any marking, or adds a modal particle or shi 是 to each option. With data from and beyond East Asian languages, we argue that many of the AQ-dedicated conjunctions developed from non-assertion markers in the sentence-initial position, which is more likely to happen in VO languages.

Abstract

Speakers of Mandarin Chinese have a variety of ways to respond to others, one of which is the employment of a single wh-phrase to form a follow-up question. However, using a short wh-phrase to ask a question is not without any restrictions. Sometimes, the antecedent sentence needs to contain an indefinite NP, while at other times it does not. I first consider the possibility of applying the movement and ellipsis approach and the base-generation approach to these Mandarin short wh-phrase questions. Given the fact that neither of these analyses captures the syntactic properties of this type of question in Mandarin Chinese, I propose to deal with it in terms of an analysis that is based on LF-copying. More specifically, I propose that the wh-phrase in a short wh-phrase question is base-generated in the Spec of CP, which is followed by an empty IP in the underlying and surface structure. When this structure is processed at LF, it becomes interpretable after the antecedent IP is copied into the empty IP position. Since the wh-phrase remains in its original position throughout the derivation, I call this type of question a pseudo matrix sluicing construction. This analysis not only successfully accounts for the derivation of Mandarin short wh-questions, but also respects the fact that Mandarin Chinese is a wh-in-situ as well as a non-preposition-stranding language.

Abstract

This paper argues that the Chinese language has undergone a foot-shift from the Old Chinese monosyllabic foot to a Modern Chinese disyllabic foot. It will be shown that the natural simplification of Old Chinese syllables has caused the foot-shift, resulting in disyllabification. The disappearance of bimoraic feet in Old Chinese has resulted from the loss of consonantal codas, including codas of consonant clusters, which has led to the disappearance of heavy syllables, as well as super-heavy syllables. In other words, this foot-shift can be explained as a compensatory transformation of a heavy Old Chinese dimoraic monosyllable to a pair of light monomoraic disyllables. One way of understanding this evolution is that disyllabification of feet in Modern Chinese is a compensatory mechanism to maintain foot complexity.

Abstract

In Mandarin, a nominal may follow a string that is composed of a monomorphemic verb and its monomorphemic object. The nominal exhibits the same constraints as a preverbal PP. Also, unlike a canonical or non-canonical object, such a nominal cannot be deleted. It is argued that such a nominal is the object of a preposition; the PP is base-generated as a left adverbial of a shortest transitive VP; and after the leftward raising of the light VP and deletion of the preposition, the nominal surfaces to the right of the VP. Based on this study, the paper reports a form economy in syntactic operations.

This article reviews Ten Lectures on a Diachronic Constructionalist Approach to Discourse Structuring Markers978-90-50690-9