The acceptability judgment of Chinese pseudo-modifiers with and without a sentential context

Abstract

This paper investigates a particular type of non-canonical construction in Mandarin Chinese displaying an apparent semantics-syntax mismatch. We conducted an acceptability judgment experiment on native Mandarin speakers to evaluate whether such sequences could stand out of context as acceptable fragments. Analyses on experimental results revealed that: both semantic and syntactic acceptability of these sequences were significantly lower than those of canonical nominal classifier phrases; whereas if contextualized, the syntactic acceptability of those sequences became similar to that of canonical nominal phrases. This suggests that the non-canonical sequences are grammatically not on the same footing as canonical expressions; and it is the sentential context that makes these sequences appear structurally well-formed. These findings contribute to general discussions on relationship between constituency and grammaticality by demonstrating the gradient nature of grammaticality, and advocate a dynamic perspective in linguistic analysis that looks at a sequence of words in interaction with other elements in a sentence.

Assessing introspective linguistic judgments quantitatively: the case of The Syntax of Chinese

“…He went on to test several controversial topics in Chinese syntax, including islands, topicalization, and number expressions. More recent research roughly along these lines includes contrasting studies on the inverse scope reading in doubly-quantified sentences (Scontras, Polinsky, Tsai, & Mai, 2017;Scontras, Tsai, Mai, & Polinsky, 2014;Zhou & Gao, 2009), an examination of aspect marker selection (Laws & Yuan, 2010), an experiment testing the sensitivity of wh-in-situ questions in complex NP islands (Lu et al, 2020), as well as an investigation on non-canonical classifiers (Gong, Shuai, & Wu, 2019). 16 Those studies have demonstrated the benefits of formal judgment data collection methods in Chinese syntax research.…”