Lee, Margaret Chui Yi Hsiao, Katherine Pei-Yi Lin, Jonah Tzong-Hong
Published in
Studies in Chinese Linguistics
This paper offers a novel analysis to account for the semantics of the adverbial approximator gam3zai6. New data are presented, illustrating that gam3zai6 should be distinguished from its apparent scalar counterparts such as almost in English and chabuduo ‘almost’ in Mandarin Chinese. Building upon Portner’s (1998) analysis of the progressive in En...
Zhang, Niina Ning
Published in
Studies in Chinese Linguistics
This paper investigates the morphosyntactic properties of the mutually dependent markers in three representative constructions in Mandarin: the disjunctive yaome… yaome ‘or…or’ construction, the metalinguistic comparative yuqi…buru ‘than… rather’ construction, and the simultaneous temporal yibian…yibian ‘when…when’ construction. It argues that the ...
Hu, Xuhui
Published in
Studies in Chinese Linguistics
This paper takes Chinese resultative compounds as a concrete case to investigate how the theory of antisymmetry (Kayne 1994, 2022) can be applied in the study of word formation. Drawing on the insights and techniques of the syntax of word formation, in particular Morphological Merger from Distributed Morphology (Marantz 1988; Embick and Noyer 2001)...
Collins, Chris Kayne, Richard S.
Published in
Studies in Chinese Linguistics
Phenomena traditionally thought of as morphological can be accounted for in terms of syntactic operations and principles, hence bringing forth questions that traditional morphology fails to ask (for instance, concerning the licensing of empty morphemes). The language faculty contains no specific morphological component, nor any post-syntactic morph...
Liao, Wei-wen Roger
Published in
Studies in Chinese Linguistics
Kayne (2022) has proposed that the asymmetry of syntax be built into the fundamental operation of Merge itself. This squib reviews some of his proposals and supporting evidence. Departing from Kayne, this squib hypothesized that the asymmetric patterns mainly lie in the functional domain of syntax, and the lexical domain may remain symmetric either...
Huang, Rui-heng Ray
Published in
Studies in Chinese Linguistics
This article examines the syntactic structure of long gei passives in Mandarin Chinese and argues against the prepositional analysis of gei in long passives. Refining the ditransitive verb analysis of Lin and Huang (2015), we propose that gei is an object-control verb which selects a vP complement rather than a CP or IP complement. By providing sup...
Wei, Ting-Chi
Published in
Studies in Chinese Linguistics
This paper studies echo answers to yes-no questions in Chinese with respect to their distributions, derivations, and typological patterns. We reconsider Simpson’s (2015) verb-raising analyses of verb echo answers (VEAs), finding that his analysis is inspiring in describing the significant properties of VEAs but that he has not discussed issues pert...
Choi, Tsun Hei
Published in
Studies in Chinese Linguistics
This paper investigates the deontic modal sai2 in Cantonese. I argue that sai2 is an NPI and a negative operator is induced at the sentence-initial position by the SFPs me1 or aa4 in rhetorical questions. In SAI sentence, sai2 must syntactically agree with the negative operator for licensing, and minimality and locality effects are found in such ag...
Yip, Ka-Fai
Published in
Studies in Chinese Linguistics
This paper investigates an understudied topic in adverbial clauses, converbs, which are verb forms that mark adverbial subordination. Focusing on converbal clauses in Cantonese, I show that they do not share a uniform syntax and should be divided into two classes, formed by central converbs (such as conditional clauses formed by V-can1) and periphe...
Hu, Bo Chen, Hong
Published in
Studies in Chinese Linguistics
Subject raising in Chinese modal auxiliary verb constructions can be either A-movement or A′-movement. Modal auxiliary verbs such as hui and yao can take a nonfinite TP complement which cannot value the abstract case of the embedded subject. Hence the embedded subject must get its case valued by the matrix T and is raised to the Spec-TP of the matr...
