A corpus-based study of directives in Taiwanese Southern Min

This study aims to examine the subtypes of directives and their realization patterns in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM). The data were drawn from a play script corpus published in the 20th century. Nine directive subtypes were identified: advice, begging, invitation, order, offer, request, suggestion, urge, and warning. The realization patterns were analyzed in terms of the main components in the directives: alerter, discourse marker, politeness marker, subject, modal expression, verb phrase, and utterance final particle. The analysis reveals a number of features: (1) Alerters mainly take the form of an address term; (2) Utterance-initial discourse markers are mainly realized by tan ‘now’; (3) The subject is either hearer-dominated or speaker- and hearer-dominated, with the latter expressing solidarity in casual situations; (4) the politeness marker chhiáⁿ tends to take an overt subject; (5) The modal verb tio̍h accounts for the majority of subtypes; (6) The dominant verb types include dynamic, stative, uttering, and ingesting verbs; (7) Complex verb constructions mainly include directional verbs, disposal markers, and benefactive verbs; (8) Directional verbs are pervasive across all directives. A metaphorical transfer is operative in the use of directional verbs. Those marking an action toward the speaker (e.g., lâi ‘come’) are strongly associated with a positive attitude, while those expressing movement away from the speaker (e.g., khì ‘go’) are highly connected to an adversative mood. The omnipresence of [lâi V] suggests that it has been conventionalized as a default bundle to express politeness.

Prosodic Prominence – A Cross-Linguistic Perspective

This paper is concerned with the contributions of signal-driven and expectation-driven mechanisms to a general understanding of the phenomenon of prosodic prominence from a cross-linguistic perspective. It serves as an introduction to the concept of prosodic prominence and discusses the eight papers in the Special Issue, which cover a genetically diverse range of languages. These include Djambarrpuyŋu (an Australian Pama-Nyungan language), Samoan (an Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian language), the Indo-European languages English (Germanic), French (Romance), and Russian (Slavic), Korean (Koreanic), Medumba (Bantu), and two Sino-Tibetan languages, Mandarin and Taiwanese Southern Min.

Telicity and object position in Taiwanese Southern Min and Hakka

This paper investigates the phenomena of obligatory object preposing in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) and Hakka. We first refute the previous treatment of having the information-structural theory as an exclusive account of TSM and Hakka obligatory object preposing and show that telicity is another important dimension to object prespoing in the two languages. In particular, object preposing always takes place when a given verb bears a designated telicity marker, independent of the referential and information structural properties of its object. Consistent with recent work on the syntax of lexical aspect that telic readings are reflected in certain syntactic configurations, we suggest that in TSM and Hakka, telicity involves feature checking of the verb and its objects in the checking domain of a functional projection InAspP. For a theme argument to be able to measure out an event, it must enter an Agree relationship with the [telic] feature in InAsp, which has the edge property that triggers movement of the theme to its specifier. The proposed aspectual structure is further supported by distributional and interpretational properties including object preposing asymmetry, height of interpretation site of ambiguous adverbials, as well as the distribution of time-frame adjuncts and durative adjuncts.