Abstract
This paper provides cross-linguistic support for a bipartite analysis of ‘only’ (Bayer in Directionality and logical form: on the scope of focusing particles and Wh-in-situ, Springer, Dordrecht 1996; Kayne in Syntax 1:128–191, 1998; Lee in Nat Lang Semant 13:169–200, 2005; Horvath in: Simin et al. (eds) Phrasal and clausal architecture: syntactic derivation and interpretation, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2007; Barbiers in Linguistic variation in the minimalist framework, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014; Quek and Aron, in: Lamont and Tetzloff (eds) Proceedings of NELS 47, University of Massachusetts, Graduate Linguistic Student Association, Amherst, 2017) by showing that it can be extended to account for all the properties of a focus particle—zhiyou ‘only’ in Mandarin Chinese. It proposes that zhiyou spells out one of the heads within a bipartite structure of ‘only’ and the other covert head that co-occurs with it on the clausal spine determines the semantic scope of ‘only’. The current proposal improves on a previous version of bipartite analysis (Hole in J East Asian Linguist 26:389–409, 2017: A crosslinguistic syntax of scalar and non-scalar focus particle sentences: the view from Vietnamese and Chinese) by discarding the view that zhiyou and the particle cai form a Spec-Head relation, which enables us to cover a wider range of empirical data. Instead, the paper identifies the adverbial zhi ‘only’ as a possible candidate that overtly realizes the Foc head, and supports the bipartite analysis based on the cross-linguistic parallel between Mandarin and Vietnamese, which share a similar inventory of ONLY-related particles.
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Notes
Bayer does not use ‘Foc’ and ‘Q’ to label the two focus-related heads in his papers. The labels in the analyses cited in this paper are all adjusted so that different analyses can be compared straightforwardly.
In this paper I follow Hole (2017) and many others in assuming that zhiyou can be a single word. In fact, since zhi can be independently used as an adverbial particle ‘only’ and you can be an existential verb in Mandarin, it is possible that some zhiyou-constructions can be analyzed as the adverbial zhi modifying the verb you. However, this analysis cannot extend to all the data involving zhiyou as zhiyou can be ad-prepositional, whereas an existential verb can only take DP arguments but not PP ones. In addition, when the existential verb you occurs in the sentence-initial position to form an existential construction, it exhibits the ‘Definiteness Effect’ (Milsark 1974); but the sentence-initial zhiyou does not exhibit this effect, as shown by (8a).
When zhiyou attaches to a clause as in (8c), it somehow yields a conditional meaning ‘only if’. This use is slightly different from the cases in which zhiyou adjoins to DPs and PPs in that cai is always required. I will not go into this use of zhiyou in this paper since its meaning is far beyond the basic exclusiveness semantics of ‘only’, although see a recent discussion of the exclusive jiu on its conditional use (Liu 2017).
This contrasts with another particle that expresses the meaning of ‘only’ in Mandarin—the adverbial particle zhi. The particle zhi behaves largely like the English adverbial only in that it involves in-situ focus, as in (i).
We will briefly discuss zhi in Sect. 5.
Some of my informants report that (23a) or (23b) are marginally acceptable. However, notice the reading we are interested in is the bound variable reading, namely ‘I’ve only introduced John\(_i\) to his\(_i\) boss, but not others to their boss’, instead of the coreferential reading ‘I’ve only introduced John\(_i\) but not others to his\(_i\) boss’. The sentence is degraded under the bound variable reading.
In Sect. 5.1, I will discuss another possible implementation of the bipartite analysis in which the QP is attracted to the complement of the Foc head via ‘Undermerge’ (Pesetsky 2007; Yuan 2017), motivated by the word order of the two heads in a language (Vietnamese) that allows overt realization of both heads in the bipartite structure.
One reviewer points out that for sentences involving the cross-clausal movement of a zhiyou-phrase, those with a clause-initial zhiyou on the surface generally sound better than those with a post-subject zhiyou. The current analysis does not capture this contrast since the derivations of those two constructions involve more or less the same steps: the attachment of the Foc head to a clausal spine, and the Ā-movement of the zhiyou-phrase. As noted by the reviewer, this contrast also holds for the cross-clausal movement of a nominal phrase without zhiyou, which casts doubt on the current assumption that the post-subject position is an Ā-position (see Sect. 2.2).
While it is beyond the scope of this paper to offer a detailed explanation, one suggestion I have is that maybe this contrast can be explained by the difference in the information structure of those two constructions rather than the difference in their syntax. The reason is that the contrast is not categorical in many examples in the first place, and adding an appropriate continuation can often improve the degraded ones as in (ii).
For those who find the two readings in (60) a bit hard to distinguish, it is useful to compare (60) with the sentence in (i). Extending Bayer’s analysis to Mandarin predicts that the two should have the same scope relation for ‘only’ and the modal. But the two do not sound equivalent.
It is worth noting that the constraint in (65) is closely related to two generalizations made in the literature. One is the Generalized Anchoring Principle proposed in Tang and Lee (2000). They observe that Chinese sentences can sound ‘incomplete’ (marked by ‘%’), especially those involving a bare predicate (without any aspectual markers) like (i), and adding ‘something’ to such sentences will make them better.
The other generalization is that a preposed object in the post-subject position generally requires a ‘contrastive’ interpretation (Ernst and Wang 1995; Lu 1994; Qu 1994; Shyu 1995) such that it sounds incomplete without a contrastive clause as in (ii):
As pointed out by one reviewer, there is some constraint on the structural relation between zhiyou and cai such that the two must be clause-mates as shown in (i), which is suspicious for an adjunct analysis of cai at first sight. But a similar clause-mate constraint for the adjunct can also be found with English if ... then ... conditional as in (ii), though the if-antecedent and the particle then are also not analyzed as Spec-Head relation (Bhatt and Pancheva 2006).
The fact that zhiyou in fact has a conditional use (though not discussed in the current paper) suggests such a connection is not a random, or stipulative one.
The particle
(not to be confused with adfocus 
) can be viewed as the counterpart of cai as discussed in Hole (2017), and while Hole argues that 
is near-obligatory like cai, we’ve shown that in Mandarin cai is in fact optional. It is beyond the scope of this paper to have a detailed investigation of when 
is optional, but my consultants confirmed that at least when the focus associate is pre-verbal (i.e. the subject), 
is fully optional in the sentences involving adfocus 
and there is a difference in meaning between the sentence with 
and that without it. The optionality suggests that 
is apparently ‘near-obligatory’ in Vietnamese for independent reasons just like cai is in Mandarin.In Cantonese, zinghai (the counterpart of adverbial zhi), and dak (the counterpart of adfocus zhiyou), can also co-occur and they observe the ‘only\(_{Adv}\)-only\(_{Adf}\)’ word order just like Vietnamese (p.c. Jackie Yan-Ki Lai, Ka-Fai Yip):
The co-occurrence phenomena in a Chinese language such as Cantonese provides further support for the bipartite analysis of ‘only’ in Mandarin Chinese.
(not to be confused with adfocus 
) can be viewed as the counterpart of cai as discussed in Hole (
is near-obligatory like cai, we’ve shown that in Mandarin cai is in fact optional. It is beyond the scope of this paper to have a detailed investigation of when 
is optional, but my consultants confirmed that at least when the focus associate is pre-verbal (i.e. the subject), 
is fully optional in the sentences involving adfocus 
and there is a difference in meaning between the sentence with 
and that without it. The optionality suggests that 
is apparently ‘near-obligatory’ in Vietnamese for independent reasons just like cai is in Mandarin.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Karlos Arregi for his insightful feedback and Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine, Anastasia Giannakidou, Jackie Yan-Ki Lai, Ming Xiang, Michelle Yuan, Erik Zyman, and audiences at LSA 94 and NELS 50 for helpful discussion. My sincere thanks go to Daniel Lam, Cam Ha Nguyen and Thu Nguyens for their judgments on Vietnamese data and Jackie Yan-Ki Lai for the discussion on Cantonese syntax. Special thanks go to the two anonymous reviewers of Journal of East Asian Linguistics and the editors for their constructive comments. All remaining errors are my own.
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Sun, Y. A bipartite analysis of zhiyou ‘only’ in Mandarin Chinese. J East Asian Linguist 30, 319–355 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-021-09228-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-021-09228-w