2,751 research outputs found
The topic-prominence parameter
This article aims to recast the properties of topic-prominent languages and their differences from subject-prominent languages as documented in the functionalist literature into the framework of the Principle-and-Parameter approach. It provides a configurational definition of the topic construction called Topic Phrase (TP), with the topic marker as its head. The availablity of TP enables topic prominent languages to develop various topic structures with properties such as morphological marking; cross-categorial realization of topics and comments; and mutiple application of topicalization. The article elaborates the notion of topic prominence. A topic prominent language is characterized as one that tends to activate the TP and to make full use of the configuration. Typically, it has a larger number and variety of highly grammaticalized topic markers in the Lexicon and permits a variety of syntactic categories to occur in the specifier position and the complement position of TP
Identical topics in Mandarin Chinese and Shanghainese
Identical topic (IT henceforth) was previously known as copying topic (Xu & Liu (1998:141-157). It is fully or partially identical to a corresponding element (CE henceforth) occurring in the following part of the clause. Broadly speaking, IT is semantically empty. Being an unusual type of adding, it properly falls into the central concern of this volume.
It seems IT can be attested in all Chinese dialects, though the phenomena in question have been poorly documented and have scarcely been studied under a unified category. IT seems to be a better candidate to characterise topic prominent languages than many other topic types including the non-gap topic, which has long been called "Chinese style topic" since Chafe (1976) and has been viewed as a major characteristic of topic prominent languages (e.g., Li & Thompson, 1976, Xu & Langendoen 1985, Gasde 1999). I believe the study of IT structure is necessary to obtain a clearer and more complete picture of topic structure in general. As far as I know, Wu dialects of Chinese, including Shanghainese, are the ones which have the richest IT types and the greatest text frequency of IT. Therefore, this study will be based on both Mandarin and Shanghainese data
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Severing telicity from result
This paper investigates the peculiar behaviors of resultative compound verbs in Dongying Mandarin, a previously unstudied Mandarin Chinese variety. Data from multiple syntactic contexts (e.g. completive, negation, future/irrealis, potential) show that resultative complements in this variety fall in two contrasting categories: atelic and telic. Atelic resultatives have full lexical tones and require a grammati- calized telic marker (liu) in various [+TELIC] contexts, whereas telic resultatives assume the neutral tone and prohibit liu in the same contexts. The theoretical dis- cussion begins with an evaluation of two neo-constructionist approaches, featuring event decomposition and Inner Aspect, and ends with a middle-way model combin- ing and adapting the two. The main proposal is that in Dongying Mandarin, telicity is not encoded in the resultative complement itself, but in a Low Inner Aspect position between the action and the result verbs, which turns the state denoted by the resultative complement into a telos of the complex event. I derive the surface compound verb via the Defective Goal theory (Roberts 2010) and analyze the tonal variation as Root allomorphy
The L3 acquisition of English tense-aspect system by Uygur speakers with L2 Mandarin Chinese
This paper examines the role of Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH) and linguistic typological similarity in the L3 acquisition of English tense and aspect among Uygur speakers with L2 Mandarin Chinese (Chinese hereafter). LAH asserts that the emerging verbal inflections at the early stage of language acquisition primarily function as markers of the lexical aspect and thus predicts universality for acquisition of tense and aspect. However, with an assumption of language transfer, the typological closer relationship of Uygur with English in terms of the tense and aspect system was expected to trigger L1 transfer in L3 acquisition. The study analyzed the English tense and aspect forms used by the participants (N = 25) for verbs of four distinct lexical aspects (50 target items) in contexts of past. The result shows that the lexical aspect influences the appropriate use of past tense—past tense marker aligned with telic predicates (achievements and accomplishments), -ing with activities (for inappropriate uses), and nonpast with states (for inappropriate uses), and the influence is observed at each proficiency level. The results show little evidence for language transfer in the acquisition of the English past tense, either from L1 Uygur or L2 Chinese; instead, the data suggest that L3 acquisition of tense and aspect is more subject to acquisitional universality (LAH)
Children'sendstate neglect: agentive vs. causative subjects
First language acquisition studies (e.g. Gentner,1978;
Gropen, Pinker, Hollander & Goldberg, 1991;
Wittek, 2002; van Hout,2005;2008)
have reported that children accept perfective
change-of-state predicates, which
theoretically
generate completion
entailment, to refer to non-culminating events. This is known in the literature as the endstate neglect. In an attempt to interpret this phenomenon, three main hypotheses
have been proposed: the
Manner Bias (Gentner, 1978),
the Weak Endstate Interpretation
(Wittek, 2002)
and the Morphological Salience (van Hout, 2005; 2008).
However, as
neither of these approaches have succeeded in providing a
final explanation for
children's endstate neglect, this study explores the scope of the Agent Control
Hypothesis (Dermirdache & Martin, 2015), a recent theory
that analyses
the influence
of subjects' agentivity over children's interpretation of change-of-state verbs. According
to this new hypothesis, the presence of agentive subjects correlates with children's
acceptance of completion entailment.
Based on this theory, the present study
examines
Basque children and adult language in an attempt to identify whether the phenomenon
of endstate neglect correlates with
the presence of an agentive subject. By means of
an
experimental
study on the influence of causative and agentive subjects over children's
interpretation of punctual, change-of-state events, this paper argues that the results do not support the Agent Control Hypothesis.
Instead, in line with previous studies,
the results of the present study suggest that
the endstate neglect
is not relatedto change-of-state verbs but to incremental verbs, which seem to
hold some grade of ambiguity for
speakers'
interpretation
ON THE STRUCTURE AND ACQUISITION OF TELICITY AND UNACCUSATIVITY IN VIETNAMESE
In this paper, we investigate Chinese L2 learners' knowledge of two grammatical constraints in Vietnamese: the first, a constraint on the aspectual interpretation of accomplishment predicates, the second pertaining to alternations in the position of embedded subjects in mono-clausal lam causatives. Whereas the former constraint is shared by Vietnamese and Chinese, the two languages differ with respect to the latter. The results of three judgment tasks provide statistically reliable support for the idea that L2 interlanguage grammars are not ultimately limited by Ll patterns; given the absence of explicit teaching and only limited exposure to relevant structures, it is suggested that learners' performance may be guided by UG information
Marked causative structures of Chinese verb-resultative construction
This paper aims to study the syntactic and semantic features of ‘marked VRC causative structures’, those special syntactic-semantic structures formed by verb-resultative constructions (VRCs) which violate both the Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis and the Thematic Hierarchy. Their syntactic and semantic features are defined as follows: 1) VRC has a causative relation within itself; 2) the argument in the object position is the causee and the only argument of the resultative complement; 3) the causer in the subject position is any conceptual component from the cause event other than the agent of the predicate verb. This paper then attempts to propose an extended account to expound how they are formed syntactically and semantically. On this account, a marked VRC causative structure is re-causativization of a VRC when the VRC is self-causative; it enables other conceptual components of the cause event than the agent to become the causer when a VRC is not self-causative. There are some constraints on what becomes the causer of a marked VRC causative structure
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