This study deals with a syntactic analysis of the V-one-V construction that has implications on the structure of verbal modification in Cantonese. The V-one-V construction is unique in several ways, making it distinct from the cognate object construction in English or the verb-doubling construction in Cantonese. Several syntactic and semantic properties are discussed that support a syntactic analysis of V-one-V as an instance of syntactic verb copying (Corver and Nunes 2007) rather than a morphological treatment often prescribed to reduplication. The V-one-V construction consists of two copies of a verb with a number or quantifier jat1 ‘one’, loeng5 ‘two’, or gei2 ‘few’ between the copies. The construction denotes the delimitation of events, displaying interpretations of tentative, brief occurrences of events. This pattern indicates that V-one-V denotes delimitation in the senses of both counting and measuring and the choice depends on the nature of the VP, according to the data. This study also contributes to the discussion on postverbal modification as an alternative to V-one-V, which is more productive in its meaning and lexical choice.
This paper argues for the importance of the awareness of "DH accent" and demonstrates with examples in English studies how a localised variation of the curriculum facilitates students' learning in the classroom and at the curriculum level. This study identifies the problem that studies in digital humanities have focused on the Anglo-American world. We demonstrate with an example in the Hong Kong context that even a curriculum of English language studies requires adaptation for the local needs, such as focus on second language learning and knowledge of contrastive grammar with the local language. To achieve these goals, instructors integrate materials that are tailored for students of language studies, who are typically proficient in humanistic argumentation and concepts but less fluent in digital skills. Use cases in teaching and examples of student projects are shown to illustrate the outcome of learning. The study presents important educational implication and direction for future research and education of the digital humanities.
1. Goal. This paper compares verbal (VP) and adjectival predication (AP) in Mandarin and extends the boundedness account of ba-construction to transitive comparatives (Erlewine, 2007).
Problem.Mandarin VP and AP show alternations that have seemingly the same semantics. However, they differ in their selection of predicates. The ba-construction (1a) requires markers of completion, degree achievement, or perfective marker le. Transitive comparatives (Grano & Kennedy, 2012;Erlewine, 2007) observe the same boundedness constraint. Example (2b) requires a measure phrase and is unacceptable without delimitation by the measure phrase 'a little' or other dimension-appropriate measure phrases, as in '2 cm taller' or '5 pounds heavier'.( 1) In addition, existing accounts for the ba-construction (Bender 2000, Huang, Li & Li 2009, among others) largely focus on the syntactic behaviors of ba, but do not take the semantics of the predicates into consideration. The unacceptability of (3) cannot be explained by the syntax alone. Since the predicate xiang 'think' is atelic and the object is not affected, Lipenkova (2011) generalizes that the ba-construction must include a scalar predicate and a difference value, which explains why the predicate in (3) can occur in ba-construction and why tai 'too' must be present.(3) ta ba zhe-jian-shi xiang de *(tai) beigwan 3sg BA this.matter think DE too pessimistic 'S/he thinks too pessimistic of this matter. ' (Lipenkova, 2011) (3) is unacceptable without 'too' or other degree markers like hen 'very', which indicates assertion of degree. This study builds upon Liu (1997) and Lipenkova (2011) and argues that ba selects only bounded predicates, which can be marked lexically by a secondary predicate like wan 'finish', degree modification containing de-XP, or the perfective aspect marker le.3. Proposal. The goal of this study is to find the constraints of the two alternations in verbal and adjectival predicates. This study extends the boundedness constraint of ba and argues that boundedness governs the behavior of both alternations in their predicate selection.
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