The Subjectivity of Adjectives in Spoken Mandarin

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

A note on Mandarin Chinese wordhood

This study investigates the structural differences between the so-called de -modification, [Adj de N], and the so-called de -less modification, [Adj N], in Mandarin Chinese. I argue that the Adj’s followed by de are phrasal and have freer syntactic distribution. I further argue that the de -less modification should be analyzed as a morphosyntactic word (MWd) under the N head in the sense of Embick — Noyer (2001). This proposal accounts for the ordering fact that Adj’s with de cannot intervene between a de -less Adj and N or between two de -less Adj’s

The Persistent Memory of Historic Wrongs in China: A Discussion of Demands for “Reappraisal”

This essay describes two forms of institutional redress for historic wrongs in contemporary China, arguing that one is authoritarian, the other liberal, and that neither is entirely satisfactory. Some victims of political persecution reject the right of the state to classify citizens as enemies, and with it the authoritarian method of corrective official reappraisal. Liberal avenues of redress through adjudication, on the other hand, remain closed to most victims of historic injustice, and are meaningful only if accompanied by the liberation of memory and opinion

Chinese DE constructions in secondary predication: Historical and typological perspectives

This dissertation investigates the history of Chinese DE [tə] constructions in light of the typology of secondary predication. A secondary predicate, such as hot in He drank the tea hot, is a predicate that provides subsidiary information to a substructure (the participant tea) of the more salient primary event (drank). Mandarin DE features in two strategies: (i) a DE-marked primary event elaborated by a predicate following it, and (ii) a DE-marked secondary predicate preposed to the primary predicate. Focusing on Late Medieval Chinese (7th to mid-13th c.), the study examines the evolution of the DE-marked strategies from three distinctive constructions: resultative [V DE1 VP] by DE1 (得), nominal modification by DE2 (底/的), and secondary predication by DE3 (地). The first theme concerns the interactions between DE2-marked nominalization and DE3-marked secondary predicate constructions. Results show that DE2 and DE3 developed from opposite poles of the attribution vs. predication continuum, overlapping in categories intermediate between prototypical restrictive modification and secondary predication. Their distinctive information-packaging functions are consistently mapped to different construals of a property’s time-stability, which are reflected in their collocational preferences. The second theme of the study deals with the merger of DE1 and DE2 constructions and the creation of the [V DE Pred] topic-comment schema, where [V DE] represents an event as the topic, and Pred makes an assertion about a substructure of V. The discussion focuses on the structural and semantic changes of the [V DE1 VP] construction that facilitate its alignment with the DE2-marked topic-comment construction. The development of DE constructions mirrors semantic shifts between temporally anterior vs. simultaneous relations and conceptual fluidity between event- vs. participant-orientation, parameters that feature in the encoding of secondary predication crosslinguistically (Verkerk 2009, Himmelmann and Schultze-Berndt 2005, van der Auwera and Malchukov 2005, Loeb-Diehl 2005). The findings also suggest a reevaluation of the typology. Notably, semantic orientation is not crucial to whether a semantic relation is encoded by a DE construction, or which DE construction is selected. Instead, it is information-packaging functions, construals of time-stability, and iconic principles that play a dominant role

Negative vaccine voices in Swedish social media

Vaccinations are one of the most significant interventions to public health, but vaccine hesitancy creates concerns for a portion of the population in many countries, including Sweden. Since discussions on vaccine hesitancy are often taken on social networking sites, data from Swedish social media are used to study and quantify the sentiment among the discussants on the vaccination-or-not topic during phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. Out of all the posts analyzed a majority showed a stronger negative sentiment, prevailing throughout the whole of the examined period, with some spikes or jumps due to the occurrence of certain vaccine-related events distinguishable in the results. Sentiment analysis can be a valuable tool to track public opinions regarding the use, efficacy, safety, and importance of vaccination

THE SYNTAX OF LE IN MANDARIN CHINESE

PhDThis thesis focuses on the syntax of the structures with the particle le in Mandarin Chinese. The particle le has two uses: verbal le and sentential le. I will argue the verbal le in Mandarin has a dual function: it is used primarily as a quantity marker and secondarily as a perfectivity marker. This leads to a result that most of the cases with le are both telic and perfective. Others, with the lack of (im)perfectivity, only extend a quantity reading. Meanwhile, I assume the perfective reading in Mandarin solely depends on verbal le, except in negative and interrogative situations. This means in a sentence with a perfective viewpoint, even if le occurs after the object at the end of the clause, it should also be a verbal le. I argue that such a structure is result of VP-fronting. On the other hand, a real sentential le is not directly related to perfectivity. I propose that sentential le is a focus marker that scopes high in the hierarchy and yields flexible readings depending on which structure enters the focus domain under different contexts. In this sense, the configuration with both verbal and sentential le extends an assertion of a perfective event, which, I propose, functionally corresponds to the perfect aspect in English. In short, although there are two uses of the particle le in Mandarin, they should be distinguished by their grammatical functions instead of their linear positions.China Scholarship Council