1st Edition

Architecture of the Periphery in Chinese Cartography and Minimalism

By Victor Pan Copyright 2019
    242 Pages
    by Routledge

    242 Pages
    by Routledge

    Architecture of the Periphery in Chinese offers a comprehensive survey on the fine structure of the sentence peripheral domain in Mandarin Chinese from a cartographic perspective. Different functional projections hosting sentence-final particles, implicit operators and other informational components are hierarchically ordered according to the "Subjectivity Scale Constraint" functioning at syntax-discourse interface. Three questions will be essentially addressed: What is the order? How to determine such an order? Why such an order? This research not only gives a thorough examination of the peripheral elements in Chinese but also improves the general understanding of the ordering issue in the left-periphery crosslinguistically. This book is aimed at scholars interested in Chinese syntax or generative syntax.

    Acknowledgements

    List of Abbreviations

     

    Chapter 1 Introduction

    1.1 Cartography

    1.2 Previous studies on the Chinese left-periphery

    1.3 Organization of the argumentation

     

    Chapter 2 Core projections

    2.1 Introduction

    2.2 Sentential aspects: S.AspP

    2.2.1 TP-internal aspectual marking

    2.2.2 TP-external sentential aspectual marking

    2.2.2.1 Le

    2.2.2.2 Laizhe1

    2.2.2.3 Ne

    2.2.3 Spoken Mandarin and regional variations

    2.2.3.1 Guo

    2.2.3.2 Zai

    2.2.4 Summary

    2.2.5 Low scope of S.AspP particles?

    2.2.5.1 Wh-subject

    2.2.5.2 Alternative question with a disjunctive operator

    2.2.5.3 Negation

    2.3 Sentential exclusive focus: OnlyP

    2.3.1 Eryi ‘only’

    2.3.2 S.AspP < OnlyP

    2.3.3 Low scope of OnlyP particles?

    2.3.3.1 Subject

    2.3.3.2 Alternative question with a disjunctive operator

    2.3.3.3 Negation

    2.4 Illocutionary force: iForceP

    2.4.1 Ma

    2.4.2 Ba1

    2.4.3 Meiyou ‘not.have’

    2.4.4 Ba2

    2.4.5 Null Op-operator for wh-questions

    2.4.6 Co-occurrence with other projections

    2.5 Special questions: SQP

    2.5.1 Rhetorical questions: RheQP

    2.5.1.1 RheQP > iForceP

    2.5.1.2 RheQP > iForceP > OnlyP

    2.5.1.3 RheQP > iForceP > S.AspP

    2.5.1.4 RheQP > iForceP > OnlyP > S.AspP

    2.5.2 Negative wh-questions: NegQP

    2.5.3 Comparison

    2.6 AttP (Speaker’s attitude)

    2.6.1 Particles

    2.6.2 Hierarchy

    2.6.3 About ne < ba

    2.6.4 About zhe < ne

    2.7 Conclusion

    Chapter 3 Embeddability and subjectivity

    3.1 Introduction

    3.2 S.AspP

    3.3 OnlyP

    3.4 iForceP

    3.5 SQP

    3.6 AttP

    3.7 Conclusion

     

    Chapter 4 Optional projections

    4.1 Introduction

    4.2 TopicP

    4.2.1 Topic in Chinese

    4.2.2 Labeling issue

    4.2.3 Sentence-final particles and topic markers

    4.2.4 An SFP-based analysis

    4.2.5 Embeddability of SFPs

    4.3 Ex-situ cleft FocusP

    4.3.1 Existing views on ex-situ cleft-focus structures

    4.3.2 Pan’s (2017a) analysis

    4.3.3 Evidence for a non-movement approach

    4.3.4 A pro-based analysis of ex-situ cleft-focus structures

    4.3.5 Advantages of the pro-based analysis

    4.3.6 Differences between cleft-focus structures and topic structures

    4.3.7 Deriving the exhaustivity

    4.4 A possible extension to lian ‘even’…dou ‘all’ structure

    4.5 Syntactic hierarchy

    4.6 Embeddability

    4.7 Conclusion

    Chapter 5 Concluding remarks

    5.1 WHAT and HOW?

    5.2 WHY?

    5.3 Derive the cartography in the framework of the Minimalist Program

    5.3.1 Disjunction-based analyses

    5.3.2 Comp-to-Spec raising analyses

    5.3.3 Advantage of the raising analysis over con(/dis)junction-based analyses

     

    References

    Index

    Biography

    Victor Junnan Pan is a professor of theoretical linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages in The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He worked previously as an associate professor with Habilitation  in the University Paris Diderot-Paris 7. He has also been a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France since 2017. He has published five research monographs in both English and French. Specializing in generative syntax, his research covers Chinese syntax, French syntax, syntax-semantics-discourse interface and others, and the topics he has investigated include interrogatives, quantification in formal linguistics, information structure, left-periphery, cartography, resumptivity, A'-dependency, locality and the Minimalist Program.