Focus and Background Marking in Mandarin Chinese
Focus and Background Marking in Mandarin Chinese

Author: Daniel Hole

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2004-08-02

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 113437531X

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This is an investigation into the grammaticalized system of focus-background agreement in Mandarin Chinese. The particles cái, jiù, dou and ye are, in a specific use type, shown to form the core of a highly systematic paradigm. This book is not just a valuable companion for anyone interested in core aspects of Mandarin Chinese grammar. It caters for the interests of theoretical linguists as well as for linguists from other fields with an interest in information-structure, focus and contrastive topics, and quantification. The outstanding characteristic of this book, viz. its effortless integration of findings from formal semantics without heavy formal load, makes it rewarding reading both for linguists with a less formal background, and for researchers with some knowledge of formal semantics.

New Perspectives on Chinese Syntax
New Perspectives on Chinese Syntax

Author: Waltraud Paul

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783110338683

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In the last thirty years, Mandarin Chinese has been playing an increasingly important role in general linguistics and has become a "must" for everyone interested in crosslinguistic comparison and syntactic theorizing. The book aims at demystifying C

Patient-Subject Constructions in Mandarin Chinese
Patient-Subject Constructions in Mandarin Chinese

Author: Xiaoling He

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2019-06-15

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9027262349

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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.

The Cartography of Chinese Syntax
The Cartography of Chinese Syntax

Author: Wei-Tien Dylan Tsai

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0190210699

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This edited volume provides new insights into the architecture of Chinese grammar from a comparative perspective, using principles of cartography. 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, offering a window into the origin of heavily "scrambled" constructions often observed in other languages.

A Research on Functional Grammar of Chinese
A Research on Functional Grammar of Chinese

Author: Bojiang Zhang

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-12-20

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 9780367422684

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The functional perspective on Chinese syntax has yielded various new achievements since its introduction to Chinese linguistics in the 1980s. This two-volume book is one of the earliest and most influential works to study the Chinese language using functional grammar. Using local Beijing vernacular as a basis, the information structure and focus structure of the Chinese language are systematically examined. By using written works and recordings from Pekingese, the authors discuss topics such as the relationship between word order and focus and the distinction between normal focus and contrastive focus. In addition, the authors also subject the reference and grammatical categories of the Chinese language to scrutiny while discussion of word classes and their functions creatively combine modern linguistic theory and traditional Chinese linguistic theory. This book will be of interest for students and scholars of Chinese linguistics and linguistics in general.

New Explorations in Chinese Theoretical Syntax
New Explorations in Chinese Theoretical Syntax

Author: Andrew Simpson

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2022-04-15

Total Pages: 585

ISBN-13: 9027258171

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This volume brings together 19 cutting edge studies written by some of the most prominent linguists working on Chinese formal syntax, as a Festschrift volume dedicated to Yen-Hui Audrey Li. The contributions to the volume address a wide range of issues currently developing in the field of Chinese syntax, grouped into five thematic sections on the structure of lexical and functional projections, modal verb syntax, syntax-semantics interactions, the syntax and interpretation of particles, and the acquisition of syntactic structures. With its rich descriptive content sourced from different varieties of Chinese, and its theoretical orientation and analyses, the book provides an important new resource both for researchers with a primary interest in Chinese and other linguists interested in discovering how properties of Chinese can inform the analysis of other languages.