Macanese negation in comparative perspective: typology and ecology

Macanese, the near-extinct Portuguese creole of Macao, is an Asian Portuguese Creole language closely related to Malaccan Papia Kristang. In this paper, I argue that a distinctive feature of Macanese vis-à-vis other Asian Portuguese Creoles is its system of negation; specifically, its usage of the negators nunca and nádi. Negators deriving from Portuguese nunca ‘never’ and não há-de ‘shall not’ are attested in several Asian Portuguese Creoles: while their usage varies considerably, the former usually acts as the negator for realis predicates, whereas the latter typically negates irrealis predicates. In this paper I argue that, differently from other Asian Portuguese Creoles, Macanese nunca is also the only available negator for adjectival and nominal predicates, independently from TAM features. Through a comparison with other Asian Portuguese creoles, and with the adstrates and substrates of Macanese, I also discuss the possible origin of these features

Differential Object Marking and identifiability of the referent: A study of Mandarin Chinese

This paper examines the interaction of DOM with information structure in Mandarin Chinese. Despite the large amount of works on this topic, much remains to be explained, in particular with respect to some alternations that do not easily fit the explanations proposed so far in terms of affectedness, animacy and definiteness. Through the analysis of text excerpts taken from the Corpus of Modern Chinese of the Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) of Peking University, we argue that, in addition to previously identified constraints, DOM in Mandarin Chinese performs another important function in discourse, namely that of signalling the high identifiability of the marked referen

Differential object marking and identifiability of the referent: a study of Mandarin Chinese

This paper examines the interaction of DOM with information structure in Mandarin Chinese. Despite the large amount of works on this topic, much remains to be explained, in particular with respect to some alternations that do not easily fit the explanations proposed so far in terms of affectedness, animacy and definiteness. Through the analysis of text excerpts taken from the Corpus of Modern Chinese of the Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) of Peking University, we argue that, in addition to previously identified constraints, DOM in Mandarin Chinese performs another important function in discourse, namely that of signalling the high identifiability of the marked referent

Lingua, società e variazione

Non present

Tense as a Grammatical Category in Sinitic: A Critical Overview

Sinitic languages are very often described as tenseless, since they are generally seen as lacking ‘true’ grammatical markers of tense: thus, the interpretation of time reference relies on other factors, such as aspect, modal verbs, and the use of time expressions. However, the debate concerning the tenseless nature of Chinese has not been settled yet: several types of items in Sinitic have been analyzed as expressing both aspect and tense, tense and modality, or even tense only. In this paper, we offer a critical analysis of the proposals made in the description of Standard Mandarin Chinese and (so-called) Chinese dialects concerning grammatical exponents of tense. We shall show that there appears to be a very broad degree of variation within Sinitic in the type and nature of tense(-like) meanings expressed, with different degrees of overlap between tense and other TAM categories (i.e., aspect and modality), and different degrees of grammaticalisation of alleged tense markers. Furthermore, the most grammaticalised tense markers are located in subregions within northern China: we shall thus discuss the relevance of our data for the areal typology of Sinitic

On a possible convergence area in Northern China

The received view that the differences among Sinitic languages are mostly limited to their phonology and, to a lesser extent, to the lexicon (Chao 1968) has been challenged in recent years, with plenty of studies showing that Chinese ‘dialects’ are, indeed, diverse at all levels, including morphology and (morpho-)syntax (see Chappell 2015a for an overview). Some major differences within Sinitic follow areal patterns, in which contact is often claimed to play a crucial role. In our contribution, we would like to propose that there is an area within Northern China, spread over the Shanxi, Henan, Hebei, and Shandong provinces, in which we find Sinitic languages possessing some features not seen (or, at least, uncommon) elsewhere. These include: 1. reduced/nonconcatenative morphology (see Arcodia 2013, 2015; Lamarre 2015); 2. object markers based on speech act verbs (see Chappell 2013); 3. structural particles with an l-initial (see Chen A. 2013, a.o.). Based on our own survey of a sample of 96 dialects, we shall discuss the distribution of these features, as well as their possible origins

On prefixation in Modern Chinese

In the literature on Chinese word formation, the (possible) distinction between the processes of ‘derivation’ and ‘compounding’ is still an unresolved issue (see e.g. Pan, Yip & Han 2004; Dong 2005; Arcodia 2012). Word-formation elements which display high productivity and always appear in a fixed position with respect to the base word (in a particular usage), such as 学 xué ‘branch of knowledge’ (as in 心理学 xīnlǐxué ‘psychology’) have been analyzed as affixes (e.g. Yip 2000), as ‘affixoids’ (类词缀 lèicízhuì; Ma 1995) or just as compound constituents (Dong 2004). In this paper, we propose a reassessment of prefixation in Modern Chinese. Following Arcodia (2012), we discard the ‘prefix’ vs. ‘prefixoid’ distinction, since grammaticalized morphemes in Chinese (as well as in most languages of the Mainland East- and Southeast Asian area; Bisang 1996) very often do not show the formal correlates of grammaticalization (i.e. ‘secondary grammaticalization’ in the sense of Traugott 2002). In the framework of Construction Morphology (Booij 2010), we treat potential prefixoids as fixed slots in a construction. In this analysis, the main difference between affixes/affixoids and regular compound constituents lies in their fixed position, their stable selectional properties and, above all, in the fixed, conventionalized meaning they contribute, as opposed to the more ‘open’ interpretation for compound constituents (Scalise, Bisetto & Guevara 2005). The sample items we chose for our analysis are drawn from a selection of the literature on the topic (see the Appendix below); following Basciano & Bareato (2020), we shall rely on web corpora (as e.g. the BCC Corpus and the Leiden Weibo Corpus) for the analysis of the use of complex words. We will show that potential prefixes in Chinese have different properties: there are class-mantaining prefixes (as 前 qián- ‘former’), class-changing prefixes (as 多 duō- ‘multi-’), as well as prefixes with ambiguous properties with respect to word-class assignment (as 非 fēi- ‘non-’). We will compare ‘native’ patterns and patterns which seem to follow a foreign model, showing that they do not constitute coherent subsets in terms of their behaviour. We will argue that the differences between prefixes and suffixes in Chinese (see Jia 2019) may be partly explained by the different role of lefthand constituents and righthand constituents in compounding (unlike e.g. Romance languages). However, as conventionalised constructions used for word formation, prefixation patterns also have properties which do not fit in the general picture of headedness and word-class assignment in the morphology (and syntax) of Modern Chinese: above all, the fact that the word class of ‘prefixed’ words is often inconsistent with that of the corresponding base (non-prefixed) word, as e.g. 贸易 màoyì ‘commerce’ > 非贸易 fēi-màoyì ‘non-commercial’, but both endocentric nouns and adjectives are generally right-headed in Chinese (Ceccagno & Basciano 2007). We will argue that this is a major difference between prefixed and suffixed items in Chinese, since the latter always seem to define the word class of the complex word; also, it can be taken as an argument in favour of analysing prefixes as a separate morphological phenomenon, distinct from suffixation and from compounding

Linguistica. Introduzione alle scienze del linguaggio

Non present

Il sorgere in Italia della linguistica orientalista: la linguistica cinese e giapponese

Italian scholars have always had a very important role in the genesis and development of Chinese and Japanese linguistics, a fact which holds true to the present day. Italians authored some seminal works in those fields, even though their contribution was not always properly acknowledged. The aim of this paper is to describe and analyze, in a concise fashion, the history of the study of languages of China and Japan in Italy, providing an overview of the most important Italian (or anyway Italian-language) contributions on those languages. Our overview starts from the earliest known descriptions of Sinitic and Japonic languages written by Italians, and covers the period until the end of the XX century, as linguistic studies on Chinese and Japanese in Italy reached full maturity in the latter two decades of the past century