Concentric - Volume 47, Issue 1, 2021

The word kěài in Mandarin is semantically rich. However, little research has been devoted to examining its meanings and uses, let alone possible innovative usage following the popularity of social media platforms. Hence, this study aims to examine in detail (a) the descriptive range, meanings and functions of kěài, and (b) possible changes of its usage in Internet communication. To achieve these goals, a total of 800 tokens of kěài were collected and analyzed–400 from the Sinica Corpus and 400 from two widely used social media platforms, representing the data before and after social media platforms became popular. Our major findings are: First, although human beings and non-human objects are what kěài mostly describes, its descriptive range is shifting to more abstract entities for much higher percentages of Abstract Entity and Event are found on the social media platforms. Second, the influence of age and gender factors has weakened. Third, although most of the non-human cases are described as kěài due to their external features, most of the human cases in the Sinica Corpus are called kěài for their external features while on the social media platforms, for their non-external features. Fourth, kěài conveys positive meanings most of the time, and the three most frequently found meanings of kěài in the Sinica Corpus are different from those on the social media platforms. Fifth, kěài is found to serve as hedges in both sets of data, but it is also used to show surprise on the social media platforms.

English has two major future tense constructions, will and be going to. Additionally, English can also use the present tense with a future-marking adverbial to express futurity. However, the distributions of these future markers are not free but limited. Instead of discriminating the differences among these distributions through direct comparison to etymological meanings or intuitive examples, this study offers an account for the semantic and syntactic differences between the two major English future tense constructions by analyzing data retrieved from the British National Corpus (BNC). The focus of attention is chiefly on the semantic and syntactic differences that lead to the choices British English native speakers make when expressing futurity. Based on the empirical analysis of data from the BNC, this study demonstrates that distribution of the future tense constructions seems sensitive to the following factors: (1) event-time orientation (temporal posteriority) or present-time orientation (prospective aspect), (2) the levels of verbal dynamicity in the whole sentence, (3) contexts of subordination, and (4) different text categories. The analysis suggests that the futurity constructions are not in the same distribution but are semantically and syntactically different. Utilizing its findings, this study aims to enhance second language learners’ expression of futurity by providing pedagogical suggestions.

This study investigates two types of adjunct WHATs merged at peripheral positions in Chinese. The L-WHAT is merged within VP and denotes a why-interpretation with an aggressive, prohibitive force. The H-WHAT is merged at the left periphery of a sentence and is exclusively used in expressing a speaker’s refutatory force without interrogativity. The two WHATs are encoded with different modalities: the L-WHAT with root modality while the H-WHAT with epistemic modality. It is proposed that the interpretations of the two types of WHATs are compositionally derived from the modality and speaker force. This study not only explores the origins of different interpretations of adjunct WHATs, but also advances a uniform approach in mapping the speaker force onto syntax.

This study investigated nativised structural patterns of light verb constructions (LVCs) in Malaysian English using a corpus-based, descriptive approach to analyse grammatical innovations. To facilitate the analysis, a 100-million-word general corpus comprising threads from Lowyat.Net, a popular Internet forum in Malaysia, was created, and the British National Corpus (BNC) was used as the reference corpus. Using the Sketch Engine corpus tool, the three most frequently occurring make LVCs in the Malaysian English corpus were identified. The data was analysed to reveal the differences between the structures of make LVC in Malaysian English and its prototypical structure. The findings show that besides the non-isomorphic deverbal noun form, make LVCs in Malaysian English prefer taking the basic constituents of an LVC. Nativised LVCs are essentially those with zero articles and isomorphic deverbal nouns taking definite articles, determiners, and descriptive adjectives in their modifier slots. The zero article LVC is the most common nativised structure pattern due to the influence of substrate languages in Malaysian English.

This study investigates the non-negating negator m̄ in Taiwanese. With respect to its function, this study argues that it is neither an intensifier nor a rhetorical marker. Furthermore, contrary to prevalent intuition, the combination m̄-tō is not parallel to the ostensible cognate bújiù in Mandarin Chinese. Instead, the non-negating m̄ is an intersubjective speech-act adverbial affix attaching to the head of FocP (realized as tō or tsiah) that takes scope over whatever follows. Typologically, this study uncovers another use of non-negating negation in natural languages, and consequently challenges the enterprise pursuing a unified analysis for the phenomena of the so-called expletive negation.