As a distinctive syntactic structure in Mandarin Chinese, the Patient-Subject Construction (PSC) is one of the most interesting but least well-understood structures in the language. This book offers a comprehensive account of the history, structure, meaning and use of the PSC. Unlike previous descriptions which were framed in terms of pre-existing grammatical notions such as ‘topicalization’, ‘passivization’ and ‘ergativization’, this book offers a fresh look at the PSC, in which its syntactic and semantic as well as its discourse functions are examined within the system of major construction-types of the language as a whole. The PSC, being low in transitivity, serves primarily the function of backgrounding in discourse. Typologically, the PSC bears a resemblance to middle constructions in Indo-European and other languages, raising interesting questions about ways to understand congruent and divergent syntactic structures across the world’s languages. This book will be of interest to students of Chinese Linguistics as well as Language Typology.
This dissertation, "On the Patient-subject Construction in Chinese" by Xiaoling, He, 賀曉玲, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of thesis entitled On Patient-Subject Construction in Chinese Submitted by He Xiaoling For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Hong Kong in October 2005 The aim of this thesis is to achieve a better understanding of the Patient-Subject Construction (PSC) in Chinese through an investigation of its syntax and semantics. Typical examples of PSCs include 那封信早就写好了('That letter has already been written a long time ago.') or 绳子拉上去了('The rope has been pulled up.'), which have a patient in subject position but no passive marking on the verb or other parts of the sentence. For a construction as widely used and commonly seen as the PSC, the amount of knowledge about it and the quantity of scholarly attention that has been given to it are surprisingly small. Previous researchers have adopted two exactly opposite viewpoints. Those who give priority to meanings see it as a 'notional passive'. Others who regard form as the more important factor treat it as a sub-class of SVO sentences. From this 'either-form-or-function circle' there seemed little hope of escape. In this thesis, a new approach is used, one in which consideration is given equally to both form and function, and especially to the interaction between them. First a historical survey was made, which provided a diachronic background to the subsequent synchronic study. From this survey it was seen that the PSC was one of the oldest and most stable grammatical patterns of the language. Next, three theoretically possible accounts of the PSC have been considered: as topicalization; as passive; as ergative construction, but each was found to be inadequate in one way or another. A corpus of some 2000 instances of PSCs are collected and studied in detail, resulting in several generalizations about its variety of forms and functions as they were found in the language. The theory of Construction Grammar is brought in to elucidate the relationship between the PSC and other constructions, as well as between different sub-types of PSCs. Finally, the PSC was placed in a typological context. Through comparisons and contrasts with cross-linguistic data and findings, it became clear that the PSC is a basic and unmarked construction that comes closer to being a middle than a passive. In conclusion, it was found that a fundamental opposition existed within the Chinese voice system between the active (SVO) and the middle (PSC), and that the real passive (i.e. the bei-construction), being marked and less stable, was historically a subsequent development from the PSC. (403 words) DOI: 10.5353/th_b3461547 Subjects: Chinese language - Passive voice Construction grammar
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 21st Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2020, held in Hong Kong, China in May 2020.Due to COVID-19, the conference was held virtually. The 76 full papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 233 submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: Lexical semantics and general linguistics, AI, Big Data, and NLP, Cognitive Science and experimental studies.
External Possession Constructions (EPCs) are found in nearly all parts of the world and across widely divergent language families. The data-rich papers in this first-ever volume on EPCs document their typological variability, explore diachronic reasons for variations, and investigate their functions and theoretical ramifications. EPCs code the possessor as a core grammatical relation of the verb and in a constituent separate from that which contains the possessed item. Though EPCs express possession, they do so without the necessary involvement of a possessive predicate such as “have” or “own”. In many cases, EPCs appear to “break the rules” about how many arguments a verb of a given valence can have. They thus constitute an important limiting case for evaluating theories of the relationship between verbal argument structure and syntactic clause structure. They also raise core questions about intersections among verbal valence, cognitive event construal, voice, and language processing.
Language users have access to several sources of information during the build up of a meaningful construction. These include grammatical rules, situational knowledge, and general world knowledge. A central role in this process is played by the argument structure of verbs, which establishes the syntactic and semantic relationships between arguments. This book provides an overview of recent psycholinguistic and theoretical investigations on the interplay between structural syntactic relations and role semantics. The focus herein lies on the interaction of case marking and word order with semantic prominence features, such as animacy and definiteness. The interaction of these different sorts of information is addressed from theoretical, time-insensitive, and incremental perspectives, or a combination of these. Taking a broad cross-linguistic perspective, this book bridges the gap between theoretical and psycholinguistic approaches to argument structure.
The past decade and a half has witnessed a great deal of renewed interest in the study of Chinese linguistics, not only in the traditional areas of philological studies and in theoretically oriented areas of syn chronic grammar and language change but also in the cultivation of new frontiers in related areas of the cognitive sciences. There is a significant increase in the number of students studying one area or another of the linguistic structure of Chinese in various linguistic programs in the United States, Europe, Australia and in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and other parts of Asia. Several new academic departments devoted to the study of linguistics have been established in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the past few years. The increasing research and study activities have also resulted in a number of national and international conferences, including the North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL), which has been held annually in the United States; the International Symposium on Chinese Languages and Linguistics (IsCLL), which has had its fourth meeting since it was launched by Academia Sinica in Taiwan in 1990; the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (lACL), created in Singapore in 1992 and now incorporated in Irvine, California, which has held its annual meetings at major institutions in Asia, Europe, and the US.
Research on language universals and research on linguistic typology are not antagonistic, but rather complementary approaches to the same fundamental problem: the relationship between the amazing diversity of languages and the profound unity of language. Only if the true extent of typological divergence is recognized can universal laws be formulated. In recent years it has become more and more evident that a broad range of languages of radically different types must be carefully analyzed before general theories are possible. Typological comparison of this kind is now at the centre of linguistic research. The series empirical approaches to language typology presents a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. The distinctive feature of the series is its markedly empirical orientation. All conclusions to be reached are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. General problems are focused on from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Special emphasis is given to the analysis of phenomena from little known languages, which shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics. The series is open to contributions from different theoretical persuasions. It thus reflects the methodological pluralism that characterizes the present situation. Care is taken that all volumes be accessible to every linguist and, moreover, to every reader specializing in some domain related to human language. A deeper understanding of human language in general, based on a detailed analysis of typological diversity among individual languages, is fundamental for many sciences, not only for linguists. Therefore, this series has proven to be indispensable in every research library, be it public or private, which has a specialization in language and the language sciences. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.
