Formal Aspects of Chinese Grammar

202 Pages·2017·3.23 MB·English

by  Jie Xu

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Published by
World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
5 Toh Tuck Link, Singapore 596224
USA office: 27 Warren Street, Suite 401-402, Hackensack, NJ 07601
UK office: 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Xu, Jie, author.
Title: Formal aspects of Chinese grammar / Jie Xu.
Description: New Jersey : World Scientific, [2017] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016053345| ISBN 9789813202900 | ISBN 9789813202917 (pbk)
Subjects: LCSH: Chinese language--Grammar, Comparative. |
Chinese language--Reflexives. | Chinese language--Grammar.
Classification: LCC PL1099 .X8 2017 | DDC 495.15--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016053345
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copyright © 2016 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval
system now known or to be invented, without written permission from the publisher.
For photocopying of material in this volume, please pay a copying fee through the Copyright Clearance
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Printed in Singapore
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Preface
This book is a collection of articles published over the past decade by
the author. These articles are concerned with various issues related to
the formal aspects of Chinese grammar including possessor raising, null
subject, null object, pied-piping in logical form, focus marker, question
formation, and adverbial reflexive. Each article has made contribution to
its topic. More importantly, these seven articles, taken as a whole, constitute
a window through which readers may look at issues from a formal syntactic
perspective and get a sense as to how work has been conducted in the
framework in question, how arguments have been constructed, and how
justification has been provided in the field.
The title of this book “Formal Aspects of Chinese Grammar” reflects
that the articles included in the book have all used the framework of
formal grammar or formal syntax, especially that of generative grammar
in a broad sense. Natural languages, of course, vary from one another.
However, the scope and degree of cross-linguistic variation highly
restricted by a preprogrammed human language faculty believed to consist
of a set of principles that are universally applicable and a set of parameters,
the values of which are to be set in each particular language. A single
parameter setting may result in many superficial differences between
languages. Yes, it is important for linguists to work hard and figure out the
rules that work specifically in each particular language and for particular
structures in the language. But, even more importantly, we need to dig
deep and excavate the underlying principles and parameters that, together
with some basic lexical and morphological properties, are responsible for
deriving those language-particular and structure-particular rules.
v
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vi  Formal Aspects of Chinese Grammar
These articles appear largely in their original form, especially in terms
of their essential contents. Revisions are minimal and mainly technical,
limited to the correction of grammatical errors and clarification of
expressions. Such revisions are noted in a footnote on the first page of each
article, together with relevant information and full acknowledgement of
its original publication details.
I would like to take this opportunity to offer my deep thanks to the Lee
Foundation Singapore for a special publication grant through the Chinese
and Oriental Languages Information Processing Society, and to Susanne
DeVore, who proofread the whole book, page by page. Her comments and
suggestions helped improve the quality of this publication. All remaining
errors are solely mine.
Jie Xu
University of Macau
Macau, China
22 August 2016
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Contents
Preface v
Chapter 1
Possessor Raising in Chinese and Korean 1
Chapter 2
Two Types of Pre-Verbal Reflexives in Chinese 55
Chapter 3
The Positioning of Chinese Focus Marker SHI and
Pied-Piping in Logical Form 64
Chapter 4
Two Types of Null Subject Languages 89
Chapter 5
Null Object and Its Syntactic Derivation 117
Chapter 6
The Interaction of Grammatical Features
“Question” and “Focus” 140
Chapter 7
Focus-Marking in Chinese and Malay 170
References 183
Index 191
vii
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1
CChhaappteter r 1
Possessor Raising in Chinese and Korean*
AbstrAct: A possessor NP may move out of the Spec position of a
containing NP in some Asian languages, such as Chinese and Korean,
yielding the so-called “Possessor Raising Construction.” From the
perspective of a syntactic theory based on principles and parameters of
Universal Grammar, rather than on differing sets of rules for particular
languages, we argue in this chapter that the diverse Possessor
Raising phenomena can well be subsumed along with “Passivization”
and “Subject Raising” under the general syntactic process of “NP
Movement.” The movement of Possessor Raising is driven by a functional
motivation, which is to separate the possessor NP from the possession
NP in order to emphasize the former. It has been demonstrated that
the operation of Possessor Raising is well under the constraint of UG
principles in interaction with independently explainable language-
particular properties, in particular, it is mainly determined by the
following three factors: (1) Whether the raised possessor NP can be
properly Case-marked in its new site; (2) Whether the nominal residue
left behind by the NP movement can be Case-marked; and (3) Whether
other applicable conditions on movement such as the Subjacency can
be satisfied. Most of our arguments are constructed on the basis of
the analysis of a whole set of comparable language phenomena from
Chinese, Korean and English, and those phenomena, most of which
are well observed in the literature, are recast and explained in a very
principled way.
* A version of this chapter originally appeared with the same title in Languages
in Contrast 5:2 (2005), pp. 245–290. Revisions made are technical and minimal,
the essential contents remain unchanged. It is included in this monograph as
a chapter with kind permission from John Benjamins Publishing Company,
Amsterdam/Philadelphia. [www.benjamins.com].
1
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