Chinese possesses Japanese style scrambling: the case of Xining Mandarin

Bell, Daniel

doi:10.1007/s10831-019-09192-6

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…While the consequences may hold in Germanic languages, they are susceptible to challenges when we turn to Chinese. Chinese is generally considered an SVO language; however, it has been argued that in Chinese, the EPP effect is not obligatory (Lin 2012), and Xining Mandarin (a Northwestern dialect of Mandarin Chinese) displays the Japanese/Korean-style scrambling in its syntax despite employing mixed head-initial and head-final word orders (Bell 2019).…”

Section: Basic Word Ordersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Symmetry in the Asymmetric Universe: Remarks on Kayne (2022)

Liao

2023

Studies in Chinese Linguistics

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Kayne (2022) has proposed that the asymmetry of syntax be built into the fundamental operation of Merge itself. This squib reviews some of his proposals and supporting evidence. Departing from Kayne, this squib hypothesized that the asymmetric patterns mainly lie in the functional domain of syntax, and the lexical domain may remain symmetric either within a language or cross-linguistically. The Functional Asymmetry Hypothesis (FAH) is supported by the global symmetry of the VO/OV word order, the commutative conjunction structures in the lexical domain, and the free ordering of event-internal adverbs. If the observation is on the right track, it suggests that the asymmetry of syntax, while empirically robust, cannot be entirely reduced to the operation Merge.

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Section: Basic Word Ordersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Symmetry in the Asymmetric Universe: Remarks on Kayne (2022)

Liao

2023

Studies in Chinese Linguistics

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“…In terms of syntax, SOV is the dominant word order. There is a wider range of functional categories than in Mandarin: a case marker, for instance -ha, is often needed for the preverbal object (Dede 1993:72;Dede 2006:327;Bell 2017; see examples under (1)), and there is a clause-final complementizer and a VPfinal tense-marker (Dede 1999:51;Bell 2017Bell , 2019. In terms of morphology, TXC is not so different from Mandarin, though, except for the obligatory reduplication of free nouns which is characteristic of TXC (Wang 2018).…”

Section: Background: Morphology Of Traditional Xining Chinesementioning

confidence: 99%

Reduplication and the structure of nouns in Xining Chinese

Wang

Holmberg

2020

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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In Xining Chinese, especially as used by older people, free nouns are always reduplicated, as a purely formal condition without any semantic effects. We argue that the reduplication takes place when an acategorial root is merged with a null nominal categorizer which copies the phonological matrix of the root, as an effect of a condition ruling out free monosyllabic nouns. When the condition is not independently satisfied, as in a compound or derived noun, reduplication is how the condition is met. Reduplication also occurs optionally in compounds or derived nouns. In conjunction with a minimalist theory of word formation, this will be shown to predict the distribution of reduplication in various contexts. For instance, the head of a compound can be reduplicated, but not the modifier, some affixes but not others permit reduplication of the base, non-compositional compounds do not allow reduplication, and so-called ‘bound roots’ (really, bound words) are not reduplicated. The phenomenon provides very strong evidence that simple content words are made up of an acategorial root and a categorizer which is often null, but can be overt in some languages, including Xining Chinese, where it is overt in nouns by virtue of reduplication.

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“…(1) Wang laoshi yi ben fu jia ha gei-zhe NAME teacher one cl book 3sg obj give-asp 'Teacher Wang is giving a book to him.' (Bell, 2019) By contrast, despite allowing object fronting in some circumstances (cf. Section 6), Modern Standard Mandarin is a VO language -like Chinese has been throughout its history (e.g., Paul, 2015 The OV property of Standard Mandarin can be further seen from the fact that various types of object cannot occur in sov constructions.…”

Section: Word Ordermentioning

confidence: 99%

Chinese Fort Creolization: on the Origin of Xining Mandarin

Bell

2020

J. Lang. Contact

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Xining Mandarin (Qinghai province, Northwest China) strikingly diverges from the usual syntactic profile of Sinitic languages, featuring an array of head-final categories which are inherent instead to the local substrate languages. In this paper, the formation of the dialect is considered from a historical perspective and it is seen to have emerged in a fort creolization (Bickerton, 1988) scenario, comparable to that found for European lexifier creoles along the West African coast. Linguistically relevant aspects of the socio-historical scenario underlying the dialect are reconstructed and Xining Mandarin is argued to have formed as the language of Ming dynasty Chinese colonists was acquired imperfectly due to poor access to Chinese among the local population. The speed of creolization and the role of language shift is evaluated, and it is argued that Ming creolization was gradual (rather than abrupt), reflecting cases of fort creolization elsewhere in the world.

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Chinese possesses Japanese style scrambling: the case of Xining Mandarin

Cited by 6 publications

References 41 publications

Symmetry in the Asymmetric Universe: Remarks on Kayne (2022)

Symmetry in the Asymmetric Universe: Remarks on Kayne (2022)

Reduplication and the structure of nouns in Xining Chinese

Chinese Fort Creolization: on the Origin of Xining Mandarin

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