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Full-Text Articles in Semantics and Pragmatics
The Grammar Of Approximating Number Pairs (Anps) In Mandarin Chinese, Xuehuai He
The Grammar Of Approximating Number Pairs (Anps) In Mandarin Chinese, Xuehuai He
Pomona Senior Theses
"There are twenty or thirty people." What exactly does this mean? Is it exactly twenty or thirty, or is it an approximate range? What about "twenty or twenty-six people"?
Approximating number pairs (ANPs) are a kind of approximative expression that takes a number pair and expresses a quantity close to it. There are constraints on the structure and choice of numerals: many combinations would be ungrammatical or denote a precise disjunction rather than being approximative. Studies like Eriksson et al. (2010) statistically generalized the grammar of ANPs through corpus studies on select European languages. However, these surface-level generalizations fail to …
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 …