Zhang, Yan;
(2022)
No loitering: on the omission of external arguments in Mandarin Chinese.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This thesis aims to provide an explanatory account for the phenomenon of absent external arguments in Mandarin Chinese. It starts from the observation that although expetivizing an agent is considered impossible cross-linguistically, it is possible in Mandarin. To account for this exceptional behaviour, I propose the M parameter, which suggests that English and Chinese differ in whether the agentive entailments of the root are grammatically codified in selection for the feature [+m]. Thus, while English agentive verbs are assumed to select a [+m] external argument, I propose that in languages like Mandarin agentive verbs do not specify this feature. Following Reinhart (2002), I assume that expletivization of an external argument is blocked by the presence of [+m]. The M parameter then entails that this operation is much more freely available in languages like Mandarin. While the M parameter provides a grammatical basis for when omission of the external argument is possible in a given language, I argue that expletivization in general is subject to a variant of the Proper Containment Condition (Rappaport Hovav and Levin, 2012), which I dub the Aspectual Proper Containment Condition (APCC). The APCC is concerned with the relation between the interval yielded by aspect (for which I adopt a system based on Klein et al. 2000) and the situation in the speaker/hearer’s mental model that obtains during that interval. It requires that the external argument be eliminated if and only if its referent does not participate in the situation in the mental model during that interval. I demonstrate that in the vast majority of cases the APCC correctly predicts agent omission in Mandarin sentences containing one of the four aspectual markers (-zai, -zhe, -le and -guo), with a few exceptions where additional restrictions are at play.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | No loitering: on the omission of external arguments in Mandarin Chinese |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2022. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10153598 |
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