Dislocation focus construction in Chinese

Cheung, Laurence Y.

doi:10.1007/s10831-009-9046-z

Cited by 30 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…among others Newmeyer 2005, chapter 2 for extensive discussion). If notwithstanding the lack of independent empirical evidence for the antisymmetry approach, one nevertheless tries to 12 As pointed out by an anomynous reviewer, Cheung (2009) also postulates a head-initial position for SFPs in Cantonese. As acknowledged by Cheung himself, the construction discussed by him exclusively involves the socalled "afterthought construction" or "right dislocation", typical of spontanuous speech: (i) Hou hongoi lo1, go go sailouzai very lovely SP Dem Cl kid 'The kid is lovely.'…”

Section: Against An Antisymmetry Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Chinese SFPs are neither optional nor disjunctors

Pan

Paul

2016

Lingua

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International audienceIn a recent paper, Biberauer, Holmberg and Roberts (2014) claim that the Chinese sentence-final particles (SFPs) ne and ma only “double” the information encoded elsewhere in the sentence and are to be analysed as “acategorial” conjunctions. This contrasts with the current analysis of e.g. ma as an interrogative force head. The present article provides evidence in favour of the SFPs ma and ne as C-elements and challenges some of the preconceived ideas commonly encountered in the literature. Within the head-final split CP proposed for Chinese ‘Low C < Force < Attitude’, ma instantiates a Force head, whereas ne realizes the discourse-related AttitudeP, not a wh-question typing particle (pace Lisa L.-S. Cheng’s 1991). Furthermore, evidence is provided to show that the surface sentence-final position of SFPs in Chinese must be taken at face value

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Section: Against An Antisymmetry Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Chinese SFPs are neither optional nor disjunctors

Pan

Paul

2016

Lingua

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“…A more common process that gives rise to utterance tags and sentence final particles in Chinese is right-dislocation (see Cheung 2009;Lin 2008). This process is not necessary for verb-final languages such as Japanese and Korean, whose evaluative, expressive and attitudinal verbal complexes at the right periphery can be more directly recruited to form sentence-final pragmatic markers.…”

Section: Right-dislocation: Emergence Of Epistemic Utterance Tag Kongpamentioning

confidence: 99%

8 On the Development of Sentence Final Particles (and Utterance Tags) in Chinese

Yap

Yang²,

Wong³

2014

Discourse Functions at the Left and Right Periphery

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This paper examines six restructuring processes that have contributed to the development of pragmatic markers at the right periphery-more specifically, sentence final particles (as well as utterance tags)-in Chinese. We first discuss how verb serialization can give rise to an expansion in semantic scope and syntactic recategorization at the right periphery, using Mandarin le as an example. 1 We then consider the process of clausal integration, as illustrated by mitigative and adhortative sentence final particles er yi yi, bale and haole in Mandarin. We next examine the role of right-dislocation in the emergence of utterance tags such as Mandarin epistemic marker kongpa, followed by an analysis of the combined effects of both right-dislocation and clausal integration in the emergence of sentence final particles such as the Cantonese wo-type evidential markers. We also look into 'main-clause ellipsis' which leaves behind connectives that develop into sentence final particles such as Mandarin buguo, a phenomenon that is not as robust in Chinese, but is common in neighbouring verb-final languages. Finally, we discuss the insubordination of nominalization constructions as 'stand-alone' finite structures (e.g. Watters 2008; DeLancey 2011; Yap, Grunow-Hårsta & Wrona 2011; inter alia), whereby nominalizers are reinterpreted as sentence final particles with temporal, modal and attitudinal values. This paper also compares the similarities and differences in the way each of these mophosyntactic strategies are used in Chinese and neighbouring languages such as Japanese and Korean, the former a predominantly verb-medial (SVO) language, while the latter two are verb final (SOV) languages.

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“…Furthermore, it will enrich our understanding of the bilingual acquisition of RD from the perspective of two typologically divergent and genetically unrelated languages, namely English and Cantonese. While RD is rare in English (Notley, Van der Linden, & Hulk, 2007), it is frequent in adult Cantonese (Cheung, 2009; Luke, 2004). The frequency asymmetry makes the acquisition of RD by Cantonese–English bilingual children especially interesting.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, the dislocated element in Cantonese Gapped RD does not have to be given information. Cheung (2009) argues that Gapped RD in Cantonese is driven by the realization of focus, with the clause preceding the dislocation containing the focus.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bidirectional cross-linguistic influence in Cantonese–English bilingual children: The case of right-dislocation

Matthews

Cheung

et al. 2017

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This corpus-based study demonstrates a case of bidirectional cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of right-dislocation by Cantonese–English bilingual children and interprets the results in relation to Hulk and Müller’s hypothesis for cross-linguistic influence. Longitudinal data reveal qualitative and quantitative differences between bilingual and monolingual children in the development of right-dislocation in English and Cantonese. While right-dislocation lies at the syntax–pragmatics interface, both delay and acceleration are observed in bilingual development. The article’s findings in general support Hulk and Müller’s hypothesis for cross-linguistic influence in bilingual first language acquisition, but the bidirectional influence observed is not predicted by their formulation of the hypothesis. Moreover, the results suggest that language dominance may influence the directionality of cross-linguistic influence.

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Dislocation focus construction in Chinese

Cited by 30 publications

References 24 publications

Why Chinese SFPs are neither optional nor disjunctors

Why Chinese SFPs are neither optional nor disjunctors

8 On the Development of Sentence Final Particles (and Utterance Tags) in Chinese

Bidirectional cross-linguistic influence in Cantonese–English bilingual children: The case of right-dislocation

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