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’.

Volitive Modalverben im Deutschen und im modernen Chinesisch

This article deals with the semantic differences and similarities between the volitive modal verbs in German and modern Chinese. The research questions of the article are: How is the intentionality of volitive modal verbs located in modern Chinese? What are the differences in their location in German and in modern Chinese? The four Chinese modal verbs xiǎng 想, yào 要, kĕn 肯 and yuànyì 愿意 are contrasted with the German volitive modal verbs wollen and mögen by numerous examples from the CCL corpus (The Corpus of Center of Chinese Linguistics at the University of Peking) with a corresponding translation. In this way, it enables a deeper understanding of the volitive modal verbs in both languages. In this respect, the contribution can be helpful both for language teachers who teach Chinese as a foreign language and for researchers in the field of contrastive linguistics.