Journal of East Asian Linguistics最新文献

This article motivates and develops a compositional account for bare noun incorporation (BNI) constructions in Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin BNI constructions, taking the form of V-O compounds, exhibit a constellation of properties (e.g., obligatory narrow scope, institutionalized meaning, reduced discourse capacity, restricted modification of incorporated nominals, etc.) which are typically associated with (pseudo-)incorporated structures in other languages. However, unlike other attested (pseudo-)incorporated structures, which are mostly verbal in nature, BNI constructions can be freely used as arguments, akin to nominalized expressions. Integrating the analytical insights from both the advances in the theories of kinds (Chierchia in Nat Lang Semant 6: 339–405, 1998; Gehrke in Nat Lang Linguist Theory 33: 897–938, 2015) and in the theories of incorporation (Dayal in Nat Lang Linguist Theory 29: 123–167, 2011; Schwarzs in Weak referentiality, John Benjamins, 2014), the article proposes an event kind-based analysis by treating BNI constructions as expressions of Chierchia-style kinds in the domain of events, where the (proto-typical) theme arguments instantiating the bare noun complements form part of the event kinds rather than function as independent semantic arguments to the verbs. Extending the notion of kinds from the domain of individuals to the domain of events has not only provided a motivated account of the paradoxical properties of BNI constructions which would otherwise defy formal treatment, but also bridged two lines of research previously thought to be independent of each other, viz. the semantics of kinds which are mostly confined to the domain of individuals and the semantics of events which are mostly confined to canonical verbal expressions.

Unlike typical wh-questions, why-questions are known to be focus-sensitive, but the linguistic realization of their focus sensitivity shows an unexpected pattern in Japanese. The phrase that immediately follows a causal wh-phrase can be considered as the focus associate without any focal prominence. This prosodic pattern contradicts the generally accepted view that a focused phrase invariably receives focal prominence (pitch boost) in Japanese. The paper presents an analysis based on focus movement for this surprising prosodic pattern. We characterize the focus sensitivity of a why-question as an association-with-focus effect with the silent focus exhaustivity operator. The adjacency of a causal wh-phrase and the focus associate is a result of the focus movement to the operator position, which mimics the focus movement proposed by some of the advocates of focus association by movement (Krifka in The Architecture of Focus 82:105, 2006; Wagner in Natural Language Semantics 14(4):297-324, 2006; as reported by Erlewine (Movement out of focus, 2014)). We argue that the adjacency strategy, which places a focus associate immediately after why, is a syntactic manifestation of association with focus, and that this structural disambiguation makes prosodic marking unnecessary. The proposal brings a functional perspective to the syntax–semantics–prosody correspondence in such a way that a focus-marked phrase does not automatically lead to prosodic prominence and the phonological interpretation of focus is influenced by the consideration of usefulness.

Studies of word-level meaning-sound systematicity in English and four other European languages have shown that words that sound similar tend to have similar meanings. The term ‘systematicity’ in this research tradition is defined as statistically non-arbitrary relations between sub-domains of language, in contrast to the traditionally assumed Saussurian arbitrariness. We explore such systematicity in a typologically distinct language, Korean. We find a relatively high level of systematicity, which we attribute to the method of analysis where we applied Latent Semantic Analysis based on eo-jeols—sequences of syllable-blocks bounded by spaces in an internet corpus of written Korean. Eo-jeols embody a psychologically realistic spectrum of linguistic structure and influence, compared with previous purely lexically based studies of systematicity. Systematicity was pervasive in our sample of the Korean lexicon—partitioned by word frequency, etymological origin, syllabic constituents (onset, vowel, coda, rhyme), syntactic categories, homonyms, onomatopoeia, and loanwords—suggesting a fundamental basis for systematicity. We explain meaning-sound systematicity in terms of related degrees of cognitive effort in speaking and listening.

This paper presents the first detailed study of pronouncing multiple wh-pronouns within the same dependency in Mon (Mon-Khmer). I argue the data involve movement, and thus a wh-copying construction: multiple wh-copies can be pronounced, either in full pronoun form or in a reduced pronoun form—and I propose reduction occurs via m-merger (Harizanov in Nat Lang Linguist Theory 32:1033–1088, 2014). This supports the view (McCloskey in Everaert, van Riemsdijk (eds) The Blackwell companion to syntax, Blackwell, Oxford 94–117, 2006) that resumptive pronouns can be the pronunciation of structurally reduced copies. Interestingly, the distribution of full and reduced copies is highly free, although there is a puzzling restriction on where reduced copies can appear, which is analyzed with a context-sensitive constraint that is subject to Richards’s (Linguist Inq 29:599–629, 1998) Principle of Minimal Compliance. This relatively free, though constrained, distribution is novel, and is challenging for prominent approaches to copy-chain realization. For example, the linearization-based approach of Nunes (Linearization of chains and sideward movement, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2004) struggles to account for this restriction, and though I follow the economy-based approach of Van Urk (Nat Lang Linguist Theory 36:937–990, 2018) in having the syntax specify which copies end up pronounced, I show that economy does not drive copy reduction in the data here.