Mandarin associative plural -menand NPs with -men

Abstract

This paper discusses the syntax and semantics of -men and four types of phrases containing -men in Mandarin. I defend the view that -men should be analyzed as a plural morpheme as first argued in Li (1999) but argue against the analysis of positing -men in the D position or treating it as a definite determiner. It will be shown that definiteness is not inherent to -men and that -men is compatible with numerals and classifiers and should be in a position local to nouns. I propose an analysis of -men as an associative plural and explain the properties of the four types of expressions containing -men within a Neocarlsonian account of bare nominals. The formal account of the syntax and semantics of phrases containing -men advanced in this paper shows that it is not necessary to assume a functional category D that is always invisible in the grammar of Mandarin in order to account for the behaviors of its nominal arguments and argues for the lack of DP projections in Mandarin.

Plural marking in the second language: Atomicity, definiteness, and transfer

“…According to Li (1999), -men is only possible when the meaning of the (human) nouns is definite: for example, on Li's analysis, pengyo-umen in ( 8) must mean "the friends" and not "friends." However, while there is general agreement in the literature about the restriction of -men to [human] nouns, Li's claim that -menmarked nouns are definite is more controversial; for example, Jiang (2017) argues that -men is not inherently definite, and shows that it also has nondefinite, in particular, generic interpretations. For our purposes, what matters is that -men is restricted to [human] nouns (regardless of whether it is further restricted only to definite [human] nouns): all nouns tested in our study are inanimate and not compatible with -men in Mandarin.…”

Controlling overt subjects in Mandarin

“…To start with, in terms of exhaustive/partial reading, pronouns and reflexives allow a partial reading by attaching the morpheme -men in non-control constructions, but ziji does not. -men is an associative plural marker that maps a kind to a salient group in the context (Jiang 2017). Therefore, when a pronoun or a reflexive is used as the object, it is grammatical to have [singular … plural] dependency, with -men attached to the object, (33a).…”

Variation in the Syntax of Plural Markers: The Case From Plural –Menin Mandarin

“…Previous approaches to -men: additive plural and associative plural This paper is concerned with the use of -men as an additive plural (henceforth, plural) marker, as discussed by Li (1999), Kurafuji (1999Kurafuji ( , 2004, Yang (2005). In other studies, on the other hand, the morphememen is viewed as an associative plural marker (or a collective marker), e.g., Lu (1947), Chao (1968), Norman (1988), Iljic (1994Iljic ( , 2001, Jiang (2012Jiang ( , 2017. 2 According to some of these studies, the associative plural use of -men exhibits a different semantic and syntactic distribution from plural -men (e.g., Iljic1994, 2001, Hsieh 2008).…”

“…As with these studies, we assume that 2 An associative plural consists of a noun X and an associative plural marker and refers to a closely related group of people where X (i.e., focal referent) is denoted by a proper noun (Moravcsik 2003). In Mandarin literature, however, it seems that an associative plural is used to indicate a more general meaning where the focal referent can be something other than a proper noun, such as a common noun (e.g., Jiang 2017). In this paper, we assume the general meaning of an associative plural used in Mandarin literature.…”

“…In this paper, we assume the general meaning of an associative plural used in Mandarin literature. As for the formal semantic denotation of such a general meaning of an associative plural, this is well beyond the scope of this paper, and we refer readers to Jiang (2017) for details. 3 For example, a noun with associative plural -men is indefinite, unlike a noun with plural -men (see section 3), when it appears with a numeral group classifier such as qun 'group' mentioned in this section.…”