scholarly journals To Give New Objects:The Information Structure Effect on DativeConstruction in Mandarin Chinese

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-194
Author(s):  
ChoiHyeWon
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Structure Effect

Anatomy of a Counterexample: Extraction from Relative Clauses

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivy Sichel
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
Structural Ambiguity ◽  
Fine Grained Structure ◽  
Lebanese Arabic

Relative clauses (RCs) are considered islands for extraction, yet acceptable cases of overt extraction from RCs have been attested over the years in a variety of languages: Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Japanese, Hebrew, English, Italian, Spanish, French, and also in Lebanese Arabic and Mandarin Chinese, where covert extraction from an RC is observed. The possibility for extraction has often been presented as evidence against a syntactic theory of locality, and in favor of constraints defined in terms of information structure, or processing limitations and constraints on working memory. Another possibility, still hardly explored, is that locality is determined syntactically, combined with a more fine-grained structure for RCs and a theory of how extraction from this structure interacts with the theory of locality. I argue in favor of the latter approach. I assume the structural ambiguity of RCs and argue that while externally headed RCs do block extraction, extraction is possible, under certain conditions, from a raising RC, and is formally similar to extraction from an embedded interrogative.

scholarly journals Information Structure and Word Order Preference in Child and Adult Speech of Mandarin Chinese

Languages ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 14
Author(s):  
Jidong Chen ◽  
Bhuvana Narasimhan ◽  
Angel Chan ◽  
Wenchun Yang ◽  
Shu Yang
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Late Development ◽  
Linguistic Markers ◽  
Production Study ◽  
Order Preference

The acquisition of appropriate linguistic markers of information structure (IS), e.g., word order and specific lexical and syntactic constructions, is a rather late development. This study revisits the debate on language-general preferred word order in IS and examines the use of language-specific means to encode IS in Mandarin Chinese. An elicited production study of conjunct noun phrases (NPs) of new and old referents was conducted with native Mandarin-speaking children (N = 24, mean age 4;6) and adults (N = 25, mean age 26). (The age of children is conventionally notated as years;months). The result shows that adults differ significantly from children in preferring the “old-before-new” word order. This corroborates prior findings in other languages (e.g., German, English, Arabic) that adults prefer a language-general “old-before-new” IS, whereas children disprefer or show no preference for that order. Despite different word order preferences, Mandarin-speaking children and adults resemble each other in the lexical and syntactic forms to encode old and new referents: bare NPs dominate the conjunct NPs, and indefinite classifier NPs are used for both the old and the new referents, but when only one classifier phrase is produced, it is predominantly used to refer to the new referents, which suggests children’s early sensitivity to language-specific syntactic devices to mark IS.

Prosodic encoding of information structure in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from picture description task

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yifei Bi ◽  
Lesya Y. Ganushchak ◽  
Agnieszka E. Konopka ◽  
Guiqin Ren ◽  
Xue Sui ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Picture Description ◽  
Description Task

A revisit to the [Num-Cl-Modifier-de-N]/ [Modifier-de-Num-Cl‑N] variation in Mandarin Chinese

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-253
Author(s):  
Jing Jin
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
The Other ◽  
Related Condition ◽  
Neutral Context ◽  
Semantic Condition ◽  
Contrastive Topic ◽  
The One ◽  
Discourse Interface

Abstract This paper investigates the licensing condition of the [Num(eral)-Cl(assifier)-Mod(ifier)-de-N(oun)] / [Mod-de-Num-Cl‑N] variation in Mandarin Chinese. It is observed that this variation represents a complex interface phenomenon in the nominal domain, which is subject to the semantic condition concerning the i(ndividual)-level/​s(tage)-level nature of the modifier contained on the one hand, and the discourse-related condition concerning contrastive topic (ct) on the other. Based on this, at the syntax-semantics interface level, this paper proposes a division of the syntactic domain of adnominal modification to account for the discrepancy between i‑level and s‑level modifiers in terms of their capability in forming [Mod-de-Num-Cl‑N] in the neutral context. In the meanwhile, at the syntax-discourse interface level, in light of the interface-induced analysis pursued by Neeleman & Van de Koot (2008) and Horvath (2010), it is claimed that the word order of [Mod-de-Num-Cl‑N] could be adopted as a linguistic device to encode ct within the nominal domain in Mandarin Chinese, in which case the ordering of [Mod-de-Num-Cl‑N] is licensed for the purpose of establishing a transparent mapping between syntactic configuration and information structure.

Can familiarity lessen the effect of locality? A case study of Mandarin Chinese subjects and the following adverbials

2015 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chunshan Xu ◽  
Haitao Liu
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Word Frequency ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Activation Level ◽  
New Information ◽  
Information Status ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Chinese Subjects

AbstractThis paper explores the relation between familiarity of Chinese subjects and the syntactic distance. We propose two hypotheses: (1) contextually given Mandarin Chinese subjects are more likely to be used with long intervening adverbials than contextually new subjects; and (2) subjects with higher word frequency are more likely to be followed by long adverbials than those with lower word frequency. The data from two Mandarin Chinese treebanks provide supportive evidence for the first hypothesis, but not the second. Cognitively, this is probably due to the possibility that contextual givenness, which reflects familiarity, may lessen the effect of locality by increasing the activation level (the accessibility) of the subject and rendering these subjects less susceptible to the memory decay caused by the adverbials intervening between them and the predicate verbs. Subjects are usually the starting point of a sentence, which has a default given–new information structure. Therefore, when organizing a sentence, we are dominantly concerned with the information status (contextual givenness) relative to previous context when choosing the subjects, which may partly accounts for the observed irrelevance between word frequency and the use of adverbials. A sentence is structured based on the information status of the subjects, not their word frequency.

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