Download or read book Cleft Constructions in Chinese written by Danyang Zheng and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is the first systematic and comprehensive study of cleft constructions in Chinese. By the cleft construction in Chinese is meant the syntactic structure mainly holding the form of "shi...(de)", and realizing the function of contrastive focus by putting the focus in a syntacticallymore prominent position (i.e. the following position of the focus marker "shi"), and by "cleaving" the canonical proposition into two segments (i.e. presupposition and focus) from the perspective of information structure. In this thesis, the criteria of cleft constructions are provided from the prospectives of semantics and information structure aiming to distinguish Chinese cleft constructions from the non-qualifying sentences with similar surface structures. And then the typological classification of Chinese "shi...de" sentences is presented. Considering the information structure of cleft constructions in Chinese, their properties are explored by providing answers to the following questions: firstly, how are the components (i.e. focus and topic) of the information structure delivered through their mental representations as well as linguistic forms; secondly, what are the types of cleft constructions in Chinese in accordance with the properties of their information structure; and thirdly how do the components of the information structure (i.e. focus, topic, presupposition) distribute with each other? In order to get some more authentic and objective results, the data of the present study is selected fromthe online corpus designed by the Center for Chinese Linguistics of Peking University (abbreviated as CCL hereafter). The theoretical foundation of the present study is Lambrecht's (1994) theories of information structure (i.e. the types of the focus structure, the Topic Acceptability Scale, the model of identifiability etc.). In addition, other important concepts are also borrowed in the present study, for example, "exhaustivity" (or "exhaustive"in the terminology of Kiss (1998)) proposed by Buring & Kriz (2013) is considered to be a very important semantic criterion of cleft constructions in Chinese. Chen's (2004) study of the relationship between identifiability and definiteness of Chinese is also an important theoretical background of the present study.

Download or read book Cleft Sentences in Chinese and Their English Equivalents written by Meiyu Ho and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Exhaustivity Contrastivity and the Semantics of Mandarin Cleft related Structures written by Ying Liu and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exhaustivity, Contrastivity, and the Semantics of Mandarin Cleft-related Structures investigates the semantics of the cleft and cleft-related structures in Mandarin, which, over several decades, have presented analytical challenges for semantic theory. The goal of this book, in broad terms, is three-fold: (i) to figure out what clefting adds to the semantics of a sentence; (ii) to set apart the meaning and the discourse function of each type of cleft-related structure; and (iii) to provide a uniform analysis of Mandarin clefts and their related structures. More specifically, it addresses the following questions: (i) what is the semantics of Mandarin clefts? (ii) what do exhaustivity and contrastivity contribute to the meaning of clefts? (iii) what are the semantic (or pragmatic) factors that determine the variation of clefts, related structures, and canonical sentences? and (iv) cross-linguistically speaking, how do Mandarin shi...de cleft and its related structures differ from similar constructions such as English it-cleft, French c’est cleft, and German es-cleft? This book will be informative for linguists who are working on cleft constructions and focus on sensitive structures cross-linguistically, and those interested in experimental semantics and pragmatics.

Download or read book A Topic comment Analysis of Cleft Sentences in Chinese written by Jun Da and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Establishment of Modern Chinese Grammar written by Yuzhi Shi and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates historical motivations for the emergence of the resultative construction in Chinese from the following four aspects: (a) disyllabification, (b)adjacent context, (c) semantic integrity, and (d) frequency of co-occurence of a pair of verb and resultative. The author also addresses a series of grammatical changes and innovations caused by the formation of this resultative construction, such as the development of aspect, mood, verb reduplication, the new predicate structure, the disposal construction, the passive construction, the verb copying construction, and the new topicalization construction, all of which together shape the grammatical system of Modern Chinese. The present analysis raises and discusses a number of theoretical issues that are meaningful to various linguistic disciplines like pragmatics, discourse analysis, grammaticalization, and general historical linguistics.

Download or read book Sentence and Clause Structure in Chinese written by 曹逢甫 and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Cleft Structures written by Katharina Hartmann and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phenomenon of clefts is beyond doubt a golden oldie. It has captivated linguists of different disciplines for decades. The fascination arises from the unique syntax of clefts in interaction with their pragmatic and semantic interpretation. Clefts structure sentences according to the information state of the constituents contained in them. They are special as they exhibit a rather uncommon syntactic form to achieve the separation of the prominent part, either focal or topical, from the background of the clause. Despite the long-lasting interest in clefts, linguists have not yet come to an agreement on many basic questions. The articles contained in this volume address these issues from new theoretical and empirical perspectives. Based on data from about 50 languages from all over the world, this volume presents new arguments for the proper derivation of clefts, and contributes to the ongoing debate on the information-structural impact of cleft structures. Theoretically, it combines modern syntactic theorizing with investigations at the interface between grammar and information-structure.

Download or read book Pivotal Constructions in Chinese written by Rui Peng and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a detailed analysis of the Chinese pivotal constructions (PVCs) and their diachronic developments from a constructionalist perspective, with the focus on the growth of the constructional hierarchies of these constructions and the changes with respect to both the form and meaning properties over time. The most important enabling factor behind the diachronic developments of the PVCs has been the sanction of the new instances conflicting with the constructions’ specifications. Throughout history the PVCs have grown along the two dimensions, i.e., inclusiveness and multileveledness, leading to a steady increase in the sizes of their constructional hierarchies. The two-dimensional expansion of the PVCs’ constructional hierarchies has been accompanied by the gradual relaxation of the conditions constraining the earliest instances, on multiple schematicity levels. This book will be valuable to scholars working on diachronic construction grammar and language change as well as to those interested in the history of Chinese language.

Download or read book The Interfaces of Chinese Syntax with Semantics and Pragmatics written by Yicheng Wu and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-02-17 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 4.1 Predicative construction -- 4.2 Emphatic construction -- 5 Summary -- 7 The cleft construction -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Previous analyses -- 3 A dynamic analysis -- 4 Summary -- 8 Semantic underspecification: Cases of personal pronouns -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Previous analysis of expletive ta -- 3 A dynamic analysis -- 3.1 A dynamic analysis of the typical and non-typical referential construal of ta -- 3.2 A dynamic analysis of the expletive construal of ta -- 3.3 Scope interpretation and expletive ta -- 3.4 Some implications -- 4 Summary -- 9 Conclusion -- 1 Contributions to Chinese linguistics -- 2 Reflections on linguistic theorizing -- Bibliography -- Index

Download or read book Association with Focus written by Mats Edward Rooth and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Focus in Generative Grammar written by Michael S. Rochemont and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1986-01-01 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The topic of this book is the notion of ‘focus’ and its linguistic characterization. The main thesis is that focus has a uniform grammatical identification only as a syntactic element with – in English at least – a certain systematic phonological interpretation and – presumably universally – a range of semantic interpretations. In broad respects, the framework within this investigation is conducted is that of Chomsky & Lasnik (1977) and the subsequent Government and Binding framework. After considering defining the location of prominence in a focused phrase in terms of constituent structure, the author argues that an argument structure approach to the focus phrase/prominence relation is more promising. This is then exemplified in analyses of cleft focus and constructional focus.

Download or read book Information Structure in Chinese written by 武果 and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zheng wen wei ying wen

Download or read book A Reference Grammar of Chinese written by Chu-Ren Huang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Reference Grammar of Chinese is a comprehensive and up-to-date guide to the linguistic structure of Chinese, covering all of the important linguistic features of the language and incorporating insights gained from research in Chinese linguistics over the past thirty years. With contributions from twenty-two leading Chinese linguists, this authoritative guide uses large-scale corpora to provide authentic examples based on actual language use. The accompanying online example databases ensure that a wide range of exemplars are readily available and also allow for new usages to be updated. This design offers a new paradigm for a reference grammar where generalizations can be cross-checked with additional examples and also provide resources for both linguistic studies and language learning. Featuring bilingual term lists, this reference grammar helps readers to access relevant literature in both English and Chinese and is an invaluable reference for learners, teachers and researchers in Chinese linguistics and language processing.

Download or read book Logical Relations in Chinese and the Theory of Grammar written by Cheng-Teh James Huang and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Cartography of Chinese Syntax written by Wei-Tien Dylan Tsai and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume provides new insights into the architecture of Chinese grammar from a comparative perspective, using principles of cartography. Cartography is a research program within syntactic theory that is guided by the view that syntactic structures contain grammatical and functional information that is ideal for semantic interpretation - by studying the syntactic structures of a particular language, syntacticians can better understand the semantic issues at play in that language. The chapters in this book map out the "topography" of a variety of constructions in Chinese, specifically information structure, wh-question formation, and peripheral functional elements. The syntactic structure of Chinese makes it an ideal language for this line of research, because functional elements are often spread throughout sentences rather than clumped together as is usually dictated by language-specific morphology. Mapping Chinese syntactic structures therefore offers a window into the origin of heavily "scrambled" constructions often observed in other languages. The book includes a preface that will discusses the goal of cartography and explains how the collection contributes towards our understanding of this approach to syntax. The subsequent seven original articles all contain original syntactic data that is invaluable for future research in cartography, and the collection as a whole paints a broader picture of how the alignment between syntax and semantics works in a principled way.

Download or read book Parts of Speech in Mandarin written by Candice Chi-Hang Cheung and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive survey of the major parts of speech in Mandarin. Seeking to identify the sets of universal and language-specific categories, it compares the range of categories available in Mandarin and the Indo-European languages and establishes six universal categories – nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions – and three language-specific ones, namely classifiers, localizers and sentence-final particles. Incorporating insights from recent research findings and the diachronic development of the language, the book sheds new light on the factors that contribute to the long-standing debate on the categorical status of adjectives, prepositions and localizers in the extant literature. Bringing together the earlier general descriptions and the latest advances, it is broadly accessible to non-native and native speakers of the language and offers an ideal reference source for all students and scholars who are interested in studying the parts of speech in Mandarin.

Download or read book Resumptivity in Mandarin Chinese written by Victor Junnan Pan and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-06-20 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The use of resumptive pronouns is quite productive in Mandarin Chinese; however, their distribution has rarely been studied in a systematic way. This book not only gives a thorough description of the general distribution of resumptive pronouns in different contexts but also offers a theoretical account in the framework of the Minimalist Program. Different types of A'-dependencies, mediated by gaps and by resumptive pronouns, are derived by different minimalist mechanisms, such as Agree, Match and Move. These mechanisms only apply at Narrow Syntax and do not uniformly obey locality constraints. Importantly, interpretative properties of an A'-bound element, such as reconstruction effects, is only related to its internal structure irrespective of how the A'-chain concerned is derived. From this perspective, resumptivity is an exclusively syntactic-related phenomenon and is thus not subject to any interface condition. Adopting a comparative approach, this study improves the general understanding of resumptivity crosslinguistically.