Pivotal Constructions in Chinese
Pivotal Constructions in Chinese

Author: Rui Peng

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2017-03-21

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 9027266050

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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.

Locality in Grammar
Locality in Grammar

Author: Xiaoshi HU

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-05-08

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 1040010091

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Locality in Grammar: From Narrow Syntax to Interfaces investigates the operation of locality conditions in syntax and semantics from a cross-linguistic perspective. It is claimed that there are two different types of locality conditions. One is the Generalized Minimality Condition (GMC), and the other is the Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC). This book demonstrates that these locality conditions play different roles in different computational components of human language, and, therefore, cannot be unified as one constraint as proposed in the literature. The main idea of the book is that the two different locality conditions are sensitive to the difference between syntactic derivation and semantic interpretation and that of overt and covert syntactic derivations. Further investigation shows a more fine-grained distinction must be made between syntactic computations. It is true that GMC does not constrain overt syntactic derivations and PIC does not play a role in semantic interpretations; however, they both regulate covert syntactic computations. This book will inform postgraduate students and scholars in the field of linguistics.

Non-Finiteness
Non-Finiteness

Author: Bingjun Yang

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-04-28

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1316513416

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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.

Language Disorders in Speakers of Chinese
Language Disorders in Speakers of Chinese

Author: Sam-po Law

Publisher: Multilingual Matters

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1847691153

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"Research interest in Chinese language impairments can be traced back to the 1930s. Despite the significant advances made in this field over the past two decades, this body of work has not received the attention it deserves. This book fills a gap in the field and represents the latest research in Chinese language disorders in children and adults. The work presented in this volume addresses theoretical and clinical issues relevant to specific language impairment in children, developmental dyslexia, phonological impairment in children and adults, and acquired dyslexia and dysgraphia. The book will appeal to interdisciplinary researchers from cognitive psychology, linguistics, and neurology with interests in the Chinese language, speech-language therapists working with Chinese-speaking clients, educationists, in particular language teachers of children learning to read and write Chinese, as well as neuroscientists. It will serve as a good reference book for advanced level undergraduate courses or graduate courses in speech/language pathologies and psycholinguistics."--Jacket.

Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin Chinese

Author: Charles N. Li

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1989-04-20

Total Pages: 722

ISBN-13: 9780520066106

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This reference grammar provides, for the first time, a description of the grammar of Mandarin Chinese, the official spoken language of China and Taiwan, in functional terms, focusing on the role and meanings of word-level and sentence-level structures in actual conversations.

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: 218

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.

A Practical Chinese Grammar
A Practical Chinese Grammar

Author: Hongnian Zhang

Publisher: Chinese University Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 542

ISBN-13: 9789622015951

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Fifty lessons examining both structural patterns and morphological features characteristic of Mandarin Chinese. The book describes cultural idiosyncrasies in language use as well as gives discoursal strategies for forming sustained conversations.

Prosodic Phonology of the Fuzhou Dialect
Prosodic Phonology of the Fuzhou Dialect

Author: Shuxiang You

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-03-31

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 0429534507

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Prosodic Phonology of the Fuzhou Dialect: Domains and Rule Application is the first attempt to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the Fuzhou phonological system from the perspective of prosodic phonology. It addresses the following issues: What prosodic constituents exist in the Fuzhou dialect and what kinds of roles they play in the Fuzhou phonological system; how to define the domain formation of these prosodic constituents in the Fuzhou dialect; what kinds of Fuzhou phonological phenomena make crucial reference to these prosodic constituents as the domain of application; and what implications does the study of the Fuzhou phonological system have for the prosodic phonology theory. This book is a valuable text for students and scholars in the field of Chinese dialectology, Min dialects, prosodic phonology, and phonology-morphosyntax interface.

The Handbook of Lexical Functional Grammar
The Handbook of Lexical Functional Grammar

Author: Mary Dalrymple

Publisher: Language Science Press

Published: 2023-12-14

Total Pages: 2192

ISBN-13: 3961104247

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Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a nontransformational theory of linguistic structure, first developed in the 1970s by Joan Bresnan and Ronald M. Kaplan, which assumes that language is best described and modeled by parallel structures representing different facets of linguistic organization and information, related by means of functional correspondences. This volume has five parts. Part I, Overview and Introduction, provides an introduction to core syntactic concepts and representations. Part II, Grammatical Phenomena, reviews LFG work on a range of grammatical phenomena or constructions. Part III, Grammatical modules and interfaces, provides an overview of LFG work on semantics, argument structure, prosody, information structure, and morphology. Part IV, Linguistic disciplines, reviews LFG work in the disciplines of historical linguistics, learnability, psycholinguistics, and second language learning. Part V, Formal and computational issues and applications, provides an overview of computational and formal properties of the theory, implementations, and computational work on parsing, translation, grammar induction, and treebanks. Part VI, Language families and regions, reviews LFG work on languages spoken in particular geographical areas or in particular language families. The final section, Comparing LFG with other linguistic theories, discusses LFG work in relation to other theoretical approaches.