Key Issues in Chinese as a Second Language Research
Key Issues in Chinese as a Second Language Research

Author: Istvan Kecskes

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-06-26

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1317336550

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Key Issues in Chinese as a Second Language Research presents and discusses research projects that serve as theoretical grounding for improving the teaching and learning of Chinese as a second language (CSL) in order to help researchers and practitioners better understand the acquisition, development, and use of CSL. With the exception of the first chapter, which is state-of-the-art, each chapter makes an attempt to bring together theory and practice by focusing on theory building and theory application in practice. The book is organized around areas where most future research is needed in CSL: phonology, semantics, grammar, and pragmatics. Consisting of contributions from an international group of scholars working on cutting-edge research, this is the ideal text for researchers, graduate students, and practitioners in the area of Chinese as a second or foreign language.

The Cartography of Chinese Syntax
The Cartography of Chinese Syntax

Author: Wei-Tien Dylan Tsai

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0190210680

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

Prominence and Locality in Grammar
Prominence and Locality in Grammar

Author: Jianhua Hu

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-06-06

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1000008665

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book challenges the current consensus on the analysis of wh-questions and reflexives from the perspective of the syntax-semantics interface. An integrated approach incorporating analyses of the interaction between different levels of linguistic knowledge is proposed. It argues that the derivation and interpretation of wh-questions and reflexives are not purely syntactic in nature but are regulated by principles operating at the syntax-semantics interface. Two general principles underlying our knowledge of language and cognition are proposed in this work. One is the Principle of Locality, and the other is the Principle of Prominence. It shows that although wh-quantification and reflexivization belong to two different domains of study in generative grammar, their derivation and interpretation are basically constrained by the complex interaction between prominence and locality in grammar. The first part of the book discusses how wh-questions are formed and interpreted in Chinese and English and shows that the formation and interpretation of wh-questions are constrained by the interaction between prominence and locality. It is shown that in wh-interpretation prominence is used to define the set generators so as to licence other wh-words in the pair-list reading in multiple wh-questions. It also discusses wh-island effects in English and Chinese, and unlike previous claims made in the literature (cf. Huang 1982a, 1982b), it argues that the so-called wh-island effects in English are also observed in Chinese. The second part of the book investigates the role that prominence and locality play in reflexive binding. It is shown that in reflexive binding, the binding domain of the reflexive is defined by prominence. It proposes a unified account for both the noncontrastive compound reflexive and the bare reflexive in Chinese and shows that they are constrained by the same reflexive binding condition proposed in this work, though they employ different definitions of the most prominent NPs to determine their binding domains. Prominence and Locality in Grammar: The Syntax and Semantics of Wh-Quesitons and Reflexives is an important theoretical contribution to the syntax-semantics interface studies and can serve as a valuable text for graduate students and scholars in the field of Chinese, linguistics, and cognitive science.

Locality and Logophoricity
Locality and Logophoricity

Author: Isabelle Charnavel

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-10-23

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0190902124

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Locality and Logophoricity investigates what the distribution of pronominal expressions in various languages can tell us about the structure of the human language faculty. The exploration of this question in the past fifty years has led to the development of a general theory of referential dependency, namely Binding Theory. This book focuses on Condition A of this theory, which concerns referentially dependent expressions such as English herself, French elle-même or Mandarin ziji. Specifically, it tackles an issue of apparent ambiguity presented by many of these reflexives across languages: in a large number of unrelated languages, we observe that the same reflexive form must obey either syntactic constraints or discourse constraints related to perspective. The specific aim of the book is to describe and explain this widespread dual behavior of reflexives. A detailed empirical investigation based mainly on systematically collected French, English, Icelandic, Mandarin, and Korean data leads the author to propose a unified solution to this issue. This proposal has consequences both for Binding Theory and for the theory of logophoricity, which addresses the impact of perspective on linguistic systems.

The Acquisition of Anaphora in Child Mandarin
The Acquisition of Anaphora in Child Mandarin

Author: Ruya Li

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-05-10

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1315281031

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Acquisition of Anaphora in Child Mandarin explores how Mandarin-speaking children’s interpretation of the reflexive ziji and their use of null arguments can be understood under the notions of locality and prominence. This book investigates the interpretation of ziji and the use of null subjects and null objects by experimenting on Mandarin-speaking children and adults using a range of experimental techniques such as the truth value judgment task, the picture identification task, and the story-telling task. The book provides evidence to show that reflexive binding and argument dropping are determined by the interplay between universal principles and language-specific properties. It shows that children at the age of 4 make an adult-like distinction between the anaphoric and logophoric interpretations of ziji. The former is subject to the locality condition manifested by the blocking effect on the long-distance binding of ziji, whereas the latter is free from the locality condition and closely related to the understanding of the false beliefs of others. This book is an important contribution to language acquisition research and can serve as a valuable reference for graduate students and researchers in the field of language acquisition, Chinese linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science.

Non-Finiteness
Non-Finiteness

Author: Bingjun Yang

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-04-28

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1316513416

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

As a gateway to central questions in linguistics, non-finiteness is unavoidable in both typological studies and aspects of natural language processing, such as text segmentation and annotation. This study presents a 'process relation framework' to explain the more complex, previously unaccounted for, instances of non-finiteness in clause structure.

Interfaces in Grammar
Interfaces in Grammar

Author: Jianhua Hu

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2019-04-15

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 9027262683

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume is an important contribution to the theoretical and empirical study of the interactions of grammatical components in Chinese and other languages. With contributions by Edward L. Keenan, Henk van Riemsdijk, Alain Rouveret, and scholars in Chinese Linguistics, this volume investigates the common structural properties that may be considered as possible candidates for UG. It addresses syntactic and semantic issues such as anaphora universals over non-isomorphic languages, the role that the forces of attraction and repulsion play in the grammar of natural languages, computational and semantic aspects of resumption, the dichotomy between inner and outer reflexive adverbials, system repairing strategies at interfaces, the v-copy construction in Chinese, the scope of disjunction, interactions between focus, negation and event quantification, null object constructions and VP-Ellipsis, child language acquisition of nominal structure, word order and referentiality as well as second language acquisition of interface properties in Chinese double NP constructions. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers of syntax, semantics, theoretical linguistics, and language acquisition, as well as scholars in Chinese linguistics.

Increments in Mandarin Chinese
Increments in Mandarin Chinese

Author: Ni-Eng Lim

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2025-06-19

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 1040040497

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Looking at everyday Mandarin Chinese conversations, this book provides a comprehensive examination of the practices used in producing Chinese increments. Increments have been identified as a key nexus that evinces how human interactional practices are fundamental to the structuration of grammar. Lim examines the common interactional work these increments do in their sequential context and what implications these findings have for our understanding of language and grammar. Based on the examination of actual interactional practices by Chinese speakers, findings show that all types of grammatically fitted and unfitted increments can be produced in a situated context. The research in this book also demonstrates how similar action can be pursued using different types of increments and that more than one “task” or action may be concurrently and subtly accomplished with the use of a single increment. The results indicate how the regular everyday practices of Chinese increment, formulated in moment-to-moment interaction, instantiate and endorse multiple principles expounded in emergent grammar, thereby adding to our wider understanding of language and grammar. This book will primarily interest researchers, graduate students, and educators working within the field of interactional linguistics and conversation analysis, in particular those in Chinese-speaking regions. As research on non-English data is still very limited in these areas, the book will also be useful for researchers with broad interests in the Chinese language.

The Interfaces of Chinese Syntax with Semantics and Pragmatics
The Interfaces of Chinese Syntax with Semantics and Pragmatics

Author: Yicheng Wu

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-02-17

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1315280639

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Interfaces of Chinese Syntax with Semantics and Pragmatics provides an in-depth exploration of a variety of interface phenomena in Chinese, a non-inflectional language, where to a large extent word order constrains its interpretation and defines its grammatical functions. Under the Dynamic Syntax approach, which takes the incremental left-to-right processing of linguistic forms to be a fundamental part of characterizing the relation between syntactic structure and semantic interpretation, a straightforward explanation is provided. The study features detailed analysis of a range of key grammatical constructions such as topic, passive, copular and cleft, where previous analyses were sought in pure syntactic, semantic or pragmatic terms. Clear and straightforward throughout, The Interfaces of Chinese Syntax with Semantics and Pragmatics will be of interest to graduate students and scholars of Chinese, linguistics and cognitive science.

Resumptivity in Mandarin Chinese
Resumptivity in Mandarin Chinese

Author: Victor Junnan Pan

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2016-06-20

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 3110492385

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.