Abstract
Minimizers are widely acknowledged cross-linguistically to denote a minimal quantity, extent or degree. With respect to minimizers in Mandarin Chinese, Shyu (Linguistics 54:1355–1395, 2016) claims that their so-called negative polarity is purely syntactically determined and is facilitated by the lian…dou (‘including…all’) EVEN construction. Within the framework of Dynamic Syntax (Kempson et al., Dynamic syntax: the flow of language understanding, Blackwell, 2001; Cann et al., The dynamics of language, Elsevier, 2005) which allows for interaction between syntactic, semantic and pragmatic information, we demonstrate that the total negation is actually derived from the interaction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics, rather than being determined by purely syntactic means.
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Notes
Abbreviations used in this paper are: CL: classifier; DOU: Chinese domain morpheme dou; GUO: experience aspect marker; LE: perfective aspect marker; LIAN: Chinese focus marker lian.
BCC, a corpus founded by Beijing Language and Culture University, includes nearly 15 billion Chinese characters, which ranges from newspapers, literatures to technologies. The corpus of CCL, (Center for Chinese Linguistics) is founded by Peking University.
One-phrases can also be separated by a modifier, such as yidun re fan ‘one hot meal’, yikou re shui ‘one hot water’, yiju kaopude hua ‘one serious word’ and so on.
In DS, proper names such as Lisi are treated as projecting an iota term (for detailed discussion, see Cann et al. 2005).
In Kempson et al. (2001: 110), LINK relations are defined “A Linked Basic Tree structure \(LBTR {\mathcal{T}}\) is a finite set of partial trees \({\mathcal{T}}_{1} \ldots , {\mathcal{T}}_{n}\)” with disjoint Tree Domains and a Link relation \(\prec L \subseteq {\text{U}}_{1 \le i \le n} TrDom_{i} \times {\text{U}}_{1 \le i \le n} TrDom_{i}\) such that, if \(n \prec {}_{L}^{{}} n^{\prime}\) holds between \(n \in TrDom_{i} , n^{\prime} \in TrDom_{j} , \) then \(i \ne j\).”.
We are grateful to one of the reviewers for pointing out this possibility to us.
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Funding
Funding was provided by Philosophy and Social Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (Grant Number 19NDJC152YB) and Humanities and Social Sciences Research Project of the Ministry of Education,China (Grant Number 19YJCZH218).
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Yang, X., Wu, Y. A Dynamic Analysis of Minimizers in Chinese lian…dou Construction. J of Log Lang and Inf 30, 429–449 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10849-021-09335-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10849-021-09335-w