1. A dynamic account of lian...dou in Chinese verb doubling cleft construction.
- Author
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Yang, Xiaolong and Wu, Yicheng
- Subjects
- *
VERBS , *SYNTAX (Grammar) , *ADVERBS (Grammar) , *UNDERSPECIFICATION (Linguistics) , *PARSING (Grammar) - Abstract
Highlights • The parse of lian involves reusing the structure projected by a scalar implicature. • Dou is an intensifier-like adverb used to reinforce the illocutionary force of the sentence containing lian...dou. • The parse of Dou suggests that the alternatives projected by a scalar implicature are true in the relevant context. Abstract This paper deals with the puzzling Chinese verb doubling construction in the schema of lian...dou (verb doubling lian...dou construction, VDLD) from a parsing perspective. Within the framework of Dynamic Syntax (Kempson et al., 2001; Cann et al., 2005) which allows the interaction between structural, semantic and pragmatic information, it is shown that VDLD can receive a straightforward explanation on the assumption that the construction is licensed by an explicit or implicit context. Specifically, it is argued that (i) the first verb marked by lian is a topicalized focus, whose parse involves reusing the structure projected by a scalar implicature; (ii) dou is an intensifier-like adverb, whose parse suggests that the alternatives projected by a scalar implicature should be true in the relevant context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2019
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