Exclusivity, contingency, exceptionality and (un)desirability: A corpus-based study of Chinese chufei (‘unless’) in spoken and written discourse

Wang, Yu Fang; Chen, Jyun gwang; Treanor, David P.; Hsu, Hsun Ming

doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2014.04.002

Cited by 4 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…In Type 2, ‘unless Q , P’ , the apodosis connective is fǒuzé ‘or; otherwise’, or one of its near-synonyms. Both types are illustrated in (31a, b).

Chúfēi occurs in more patterns than Table 4 suggests; for example, the chúfēi -marked protasis may be post-posed (Wang et al 2014). Despite its incompleteness, Table 4 captures the primary focuses of the literature on chúfēi : the meanings of ‘only if’ and ‘unless’ and its protasis-marking function.…”

Section: Bidirectionality Between Modal and Conditional: Chúfēi And...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…

Because chúfēi heads the apodosis in this construction, it is problematic for accounts treating it as exclusively a conditional. In the literature, this construction is either neglected or downplayed (Yang 2007; Wang et al 2014), likely due to its low frequency in Modern Mandarin. According to Wang et al (2014: 46), 1.9% of chúfēi in Spoken Chinese and 0.5% in Written Chinese are [ if wants P chúfēi Q ].…”

Section: Bidirectionality Between Modal and Conditional: Chúfēi And...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the literature, this construction is either neglected or downplayed (Yang 2007; Wang et al 2014), likely due to its low frequency in Modern Mandarin. According to Wang et al (2014: 46), 1.9% of chúfēi in Spoken Chinese and 0.5% in Written Chinese are [ if wants P chúfēi Q ]. But it is more frequent in Early Mandarin: in texts between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries in the corpus (from Shuǐhǔzhuàn to Qílùdēng ), 32.9% (26/79) of chúfēi appears in [ if wants P chúfēi Q ].…”

Section: Bidirectionality Between Modal and Conditional: Chúfēi And...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A modal xūshì 'must' occupies the MODAL position in (2). In the corresponding position in (3), it is chúfēi, typically a conditional 'only if' (Eifring 1995;Yang 2007;Wang et al 2014) but rendered into 'must' here. Items in the IF, WANTS, MODAL, and THEN positions are in bold.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Bidirectional grammaticalization: Chinese modal and conditional

Kuo¹

2023

J. Ling.

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Using a constructional approach to morphosyntax, this study describes a triclausal construction (a type of anankastic conditional construction) and related constructions in the history of Chinese. It demonstrates that the triclausal construction constitutes a context of morphosyntactic vagueness where category boundaries between modals and conditional protasis connectives are underdetermined; consequently, bidirectional rather than unidirectional developments occur. Morphosyntactic vagueness is defined by properties shared between two morphosyntactic categories: distributional and functional similarities. Therefore, changes enabled by morphosyntactic vagueness are argued to be regular processes of change mediated by grammatical equivalence. If grammaticalization is defined as the development of morphosyntactic categories, but not in terms of non-equivalence such as unidirectionality or increased grammaticality, grammaticalization may be systematically bidirectional when enabled by morphosyntactic vagueness.

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“…In Type 2, ‘unless Q , P’ , the apodosis connective is fǒuzé ‘or; otherwise’, or one of its near-synonyms. Both types are illustrated in (31a, b).

Section: Bidirectionality Between Modal and Conditional: Chúfēi And...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…

Section: Bidirectionality Between Modal and Conditional: Chúfēi And...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Bidirectionality Between Modal and Conditional: Chúfēi And...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Bidirectional grammaticalization: Chinese modal and conditional

Kuo¹

2023

J. Ling.

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“…In this study, only descriptive statistics were reported for mean F0, duration and amplitude (with SD), and some interparticipant differences were found. For Taiwan Mandarin (henceforth TwM), Shyu and Tung [14] reported two different findings; first, based on eight tokens (from a corpus [15]), they reported some differences between wh-interrogatives and indefinites, but the syntactic and phonetic contexts where these eight tokens occurred were different; second, their production study showed that speakers did not acoustically disambiguate wh-indeterminates; however, since participants responded to the same two items for one context, it is difficult to draw a general conclusion for TwM. Thus far, the findings about Mandarin wh-indeterminates seem not yet to be conclusive.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sentence Prosody and Wh-Indeterminates in Taiwan Mandarin

Hsu¹,

2019

Interspeech 2019

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We report results of a speech production experiment about the intonation of three sentence types in Taiwan Mandarin, and discuss our results with implications for focus acoustics, and semantic-syntactic theories of sentence final particles and whindeterminates. Wh-indeterminates refer to wh-phrases that are ambiguous between interrogative and indefinite readings. In Mandarin, different interpretations of wh-indeterminates are not morphologically marked, but can be disambiguated in specific sentence contexts marked by sentence final particles. In this study, we systematically examined the intonation of whquestions and yes/no questions by using declarative sentences as the baseline. The results show that both wh-and yes/no questions exhibit F0 prominence, and lengthening effects on regions containing sentence-final particles and wh-phrases, but the effects were stronger in wh-questions. Examining the duration and F0 range, we found that wh-phrases and sentence final particles together formed specific acoustic patterns to distinguish questions from declarative sentences. The findings suggest that the prosodic organization interacts with other internal structural organization.

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Morphosyntactic vagueness and directionality

Kuo

2021

Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association

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This paper shows that morphosyntactic vagueness exists between several minor morphosyntactic categories in Mandarin (modal, protasis connective and types of classifier): these categories share formal distributional properties and functional similarities such that their morphosyntactic distinctions become neutralized in some contexts. Consequently, bidirectionality rather than unidirectionality may characterize these categories diachronically. This paper proposes that any direction of change that is motivated by morphosyntactic vagueness should be regarded as regular and systematic, even if it is not unidirectional, and identifies some directions for future research on morphosyntactic vagueness in diachrony.

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Exclusivity, contingency, exceptionality and (un)desirability: A corpus-based study of Chinese chufei (‘unless’) in spoken and written discourse

Cited by 4 publications

References 16 publications

Bidirectional grammaticalization: Chinese modal and conditional

Bidirectional grammaticalization: Chinese modal and conditional

Sentence Prosody and Wh-Indeterminates in Taiwan Mandarin

Morphosyntactic vagueness and directionality

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