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Full-Text Articles in Semantics and Pragmatics
Between Verb And Preposition: Diachronic Stages Of Coverbs In Mandarin Chinese, Glynis Jones
Between Verb And Preposition: Diachronic Stages Of Coverbs In Mandarin Chinese, Glynis Jones
Masters Theses
Mandarin Chinese has long been known to possess a category of words known as ‘coverbs’ in the literature, which sit in the gray area between verb and preposition. Li and Thompson (1974) describe the historical origins of Mandarin coverbs to be full transitive verbs, despite their modern state being decidedly less verbal. They also note that coverbs are a non-homogenous class. This thesis works to establish categories of coverbs in Mandarin Chinese and their distance from true verbhood in order to understand the diachronic shift that coverbs are currently undergoing before our very eyes. I will draw on the work …
The Head-Quarters Of Mandarin Arguments, Hsin-Lun Huang
The Head-Quarters Of Mandarin Arguments, Hsin-Lun Huang
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation looks at the syntactic distributions of various Mandarin arguments and develops an argument structure that takes into account the arguments’ semantic types. Theories of argument realization mostly build on a one-to-one correspondence between the syntactic positions of arguments and the thematic relations they bear to the verb in the underlying structure. And this correspondence is rooted in the assumption that the argument positions in the verb’s projection must be saturated before other semantic compositions can take place. This dissertation argues that the saturation requirement can be alleviated, depending on whether languages make a morphological distinction in their syntax. …