Nobody there? On the non-existence of nobody in Mandarin Chinese and related issues

The present article demonstrates how the so far unchallenged misanalysis within Chinese linguistics of a few, but central, data points has led to a distorted picture biasing, inter alia, the general typology of wh-in-situ languages as well as the crosslinguistic study of Quantifier Phrases. This is the case for méi yǒu rén ‘not exist person’, hěnshǎo yǒu rén ‘rarely exist person’, and zhǐ yǒu DP ‘only exist DP’, which are not nominal projections equivalent of ‘nobody’, ‘only DP’, and ‘few people’ as currently assumed, but existential constructions: ‘there isn't anybody’, ‘there is only DP’, and ‘there are rarely people’. In addition, a subset of speakers has reanalyzed hěnshǎo (yǒu) rén with a covert yǒu ‘exist’ as a QP hěnshǎo rén ‘few people’. A corpus study highlights the limited distribution of hěnshǎo rén ‘few people’, which shows that it is not on a par with its antonym hěn duō rén ‘many people’.

On the scope of quantifier phrases in Chinese passive construction

Quantifier phrases (QP) can co-occur in a single sentence, which may cause ambiguity in terms of scope relation, viz. wide scope and narrow scope interpretations. Aoun & Li (1993) claim that quantifier scope ambiguity also exists in Chinese passive construction, such as yige nűren bei meige ren ma ‘a woman was scolded by everyone’. Following Lee (1986)’s proposal, it is argued in this paper that the scopal relations of Chinese QPs are not purely syntactic as in Aoun & Li’s analysis, but should be determined by the interaction between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Based on naturalistic data, it is shown that (i) Chinese QPs can be classified into whQP, distributive-universal QP and group-denoting QP, whose semantic properties determine the scope relations between them; (ii) in general, a QP is devoid of referentiality, yet it can acquire referentiality depending on its co-occurrence with other QPs or contextual factors; (iii) the subject definiteness constraint in Chinese, a language-specific constraint, would affect the interpretation of subject QPs in Chinese passive construction.

Machine Translation of Concise State Sentences for Quantifier Phrases

With the development of deep learning methods, the machine translation system based on deep neural network has reached a very high accuracy, but for some daily Chinese phenomenon machine translation system is still not able to translate correctly. In this paper, we study a sentence that often appears in Chinese spoken language, that is, a simple state sentence composed of quantitative phrases, and improve the existing machine translation system. The external helper program constructed in this paper is compatible with the current mainstream network translation systems, greatly improving the translation effect of these translation systems on the concise state sentences composed of quantitative phrases.

A new classifier-based plural morpheme in German Sign Language (DGS)

German Sign Language (DGS) displays variation in the simple plural, the form of which is conditioned by classes of phonological features within the lexicon. As a consequence, the overt realization of the plural marker is restricted to a small set of nouns specified for the appropriate phonological features, while the rest are left bare (Pfau & Steinbach 2005, 2006; Steinbach 2012). Pfau & Steinbach (2005) report a number of ‘alternative pluralization strategies’ available as repairs for this underspecification, including classifier constructions, spatial localization, and number and quantifier phrases. I propose a previously undescribed mechanism for plural marking, the ‘classifier-based plural morpheme’ (CLP), grammaticalized from the classifier system into a morpheme in the grammars of individual DGS signers. Elicitation data show that this morpheme attaches only to nouns which are specified for phonological features that restrict the realization of the canonical plural marker, adding a new option to the range of pluralization strategies available.

Countability, agreement and the loss of the dual in Russian

In this work we investigate the internal syntax and semantics of quantifier phrases (QP) involving cardinal numerals. Concentrating on a set of previously documented puzzles concerning Case and number agreement within the numeral phrase in Russian, we argue that these agreement patterns follow naturally if one recognizes three structural layers in a numeral-based QP: the countability layer, the number layer and the quantificational layer. Our central theoretical claim is that the countability layer is implemented as a (pseudo-)classifier structure whose morphological manifestation obeys a principle of syntactic ‘visibility’. Our specific claim for Russian is that, diachronically, this countability layer has emerged as a result of the loss of the dual number in the course of transition between Old and Modern Russian. We strengthen our conclusions with psycholinguistic evidence from a sentence completion study that tests Russian speakers’ sensitivity to the countability layer.