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In attempting to reconstruct the morphosyntax of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, one of the most basic questions to be answered is what was the unmarked word order of the proto-language? Chinese, Bai, and Karen are verb-medial languages, while all of the Tibeto-Burman languages except for Bai and Karen have verb-final word order. lf these languages are all related, as we can assume from lexical correspondences, then either Chinese, Bai and Karen changed from verb-final to verb-medial word order, or the other Tibeto-Burman languages changed trom verb-medial to verb-final order. How we answer the question of which languages changed their word would then give us the answer to the question of word order in Proto-Sino-Tibetan.
Thirty-one years ago Tsu-lin Mei (1961) argued against the traditional doctrine that saw the subject-predicate distinction in grammar as parallel to the particular- universal distinction in logic, as he said it was a reflex of an Indo-European bias, and could not be valid, as ‘Chinese ... does not admit a distinction into subject and predicate’ (p. 153). This has not stopped linguists working on Chinese from attempting to define ‘subject’ (and ‘object’) in Chinese. Though a number of linguists have lamented the difficulties in trying to define these concepts for Chinese (see below), most work done on Chinese still assumes that Chinese must have the same grammatical features as Indo-European, such as having a subject and a direct object, though no attempt is made to justify that view. This paper challenges that view and argues that there has been no grammaticalization of syntactic functions in Chinese. The correct assignment of semantic roles to the constituents of a discourse is done by the listener on the basis of the discourse structure and pragmatics (information flow, inference, relevance, and real world knowledge) (cf. Li & Thompson 1978, 1979; LaPolla 1990).
The bulk of this dissertation is an analysis of grammatical relations (including syntactic, pragmatic, and semantic relations) in Modern Mandarin Chinese. In Chapter I the background, functional framework, and concepts used in the dissertation are introduced. In Chapter II it is shown that Chinese has not grammaticalized the syntactic functions 'subject' and 'object', and has no syntactic function-changing passive construction. In Chapter III the nature of word order and its relationship to information structure in Chinese is examined. It is argued that word order in Chinese does not mark 'definite' and 'indefinite' NPs, as is commonly assumed, but marks information structure. A number of marked focus structure constructions are also discussed. In Chapter IV the discussion is of the structure of Chinese discourse, developed from an analysis of the nature of discourse referent tracking. It is shown that recovery of anaphora is not based on syntactic functions, but is based on real world knowledge (semantics and pragmatics) and discourse structure. Chapter V gives the conclusions, followed by a discussion of some of the diachronic considerations that arose in the course of this investigation. It is suggested that within Sino-Tibetan, Chinese should be seen as an innovator in terms of word order, and that grammatical relations in Proto-Sino-Tibetan should be seen to be pragmatically based rather than syntactically based.
This paper discusses an attempt to write a computer program that would properly model the phonological development of Chinese from Middle Chinese to Modern Peking Mandarin, using the rules in Chen 1976. Several problems are encountered, the most significant being that the rules cannot apply in the same order for all lexical items. The significance of this in terms of the implementation of sound change is briefly discussed.
This paper is the second in a series arguing for a discourse·based analysis of grammatical relations in Chinese in which there is a direct mapping between semantic role and grammatical function, and there are no relation-changing lexical rules such as passivization that can change that mapping. The correct assignment of semantic roles to the constituents of a discourse is done by the listener purely on the basis of the discourse structure and pragmatics (real world knowledge). Though grammatical analyses of certain constructions can be done on the sentence level, the sentence is generally not the central unit for understanding anaphora and grammatical relations in Chinese. Two related arguments are presented here: the question of 'subject' and the structure of discourse developed from an analysis of the nature of discourse referent tracking.
This paper is one argument for a theory of grammatical relations in Chinese in which there are no grammatical relations beyond semantic roles, and no lexical relation-changing rules. As the passive rule is one of the most common relation changing rules cross-linguistically, in this paper I will address the question of whether or not Mandarin Chinese has lexical passives, that is, passives defined as in Relational Grammar (see for example Perlmutter and Postal 1977) and the early Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) literature (e.g. Bresnan 1982), where a 2-arc (object) is promoted to a 1-arc (subject).
Wenn in dieser Arbeit von "dem Chinesischen" die Rede ist, so ist darunter die heute in China gesprochene Umgangssprache zu verstehen. Diese pǔtōnghuà, d.h. 'allgemeine Sprache', basiert vor allem auf dem im Norden Chinas gesprochenen Dialekt und zwar sowohl auf phonologischer, syntaktischer als auch lexikalischer Ebene. [...] Den Untersuchungsgegenstand dieser Arbeit bildet eine Gruppe von Morphemen im Chinesischen, die sowohl Vollverben sind als auch in Sätzen der Form 'Subjekt ___ NP V (NP)' vorkommen, in denen sie mit der darauffolgenden Nominalphrase eine Konstituente bilden und keinen Vollverbstatus mehr haben. In dieser Funktion werden sie als "Koverb" bezeichnet. […] [K]ategorielle[] Analysen werden dem Phänomen der Koverben nicht gerecht. Vielmehr deutet ihr unterschiedliches Verhalten auf ein Kontinuum, auf dem sie sich zwischen den Polen Verb und Präposition einordnen lassen. Um die verschiedenen Positionen der Koverben auf dem Kontinuum zu bestimmen, die ihrem unterschiedlich hohen Grad an Verbalhaftigkeit entsprechen, werden sie einer Reihe von Tests unterzogen, die Aufschluß über ihren verbalen Charakter geben.[…] Den Schwerpunkt der Arbeit bilden die Kapitel 5 bis 10, in denen jeweils ein Koverb behandelt wird. Die in diesem Teil vorgestellten Daten wurden vorwiegend durch Informantenbefragung gewonnen sowie aus der Literatur übernommen. Diese zitierten Beispiele wurden mithilfe der Informantin überprüft. Den Abschluß der Arbeit bildet Kapitel 11, in dem die Ergebnisse der Untersuchung in einer Skala zusammengefaßt werden und der theoretische Hintergrund dieser Darstellungsweise erläutert wird.