Abstract
This paper investigates two puzzles regarding property concept (PC) lexemes (Dixon in Where have all the adjectives gone? And other essays in semantics and syntax. Mouton, The Hague, 1982) in Mandarin: why degree modifiers such as hen ‘very’ are compatible with gradable adjectives such as gao ‘tall’ as well as PC nominals such as zhihui ‘wisdom’, but not with concrete mass nouns such as shui ‘water’ in simple declarative clauses, and why degree modifiers are obligatory to block comparative interpretation in sentences with gradable adjectives and possessive PC nominal phrases. I demonstrate the data of PC nominals in possessive constructions with positive and comparative interpretations. Following Francez and Koontz-Garboden (Semantics and morphosyntactic variation: qualities and the grammar of property concepts. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017), I argue that PC nominals and other mass nouns in Mandarin are semantically distinct in such a way that the latter lack inherent measures. Furthermore, I argue that gradable adjectives and possessive PC nominal phrases are model-theoretically equivalent. Moreover, I propose that degree modifiers such as hen are compulsory to block comparative interpretations in PC sentences because possessive PC phrases are Adjective Phrases and require an overt degree modifier or a covert comparative operator to satisfy the T[+ V] constraint in Mandarin proposed by Grano (Nat Lang Linguist Theory 30:513–565, 2012).
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Notes
Glossing abbreviations in Mandarin data: 1SING = first person singular; 3SING = third person singular; BA = markers of BA-construction; COP = copula; DE in (67)–(69) = possessive marker; DE elsewhere = adverbial modifier marker; DEM = demonstrative; DOU = focus marker; FIN = finite; LE = perfective marker or sentence-final particle; NEG = negation; PAR = particle; POSS = possessive morpheme; Q = question marker; SUB = subordinate.
Grano (2012) proposes an opposite view arguing that hen is not an overt lexicalization of POS; rather, covert POS is not available in Mandarin and hen is a type and category shifter that is needed to approximate positive semantics. This paper follows Grano’s approach, which will be discussed in Sects. 2.4 and 4.2.
Kennedy and Levin (2008) argue that change-of-state verbs derived from gradable adjectives have a comparative component in which one individual at two different time points is compared with respect to some dimension; for instance, the sentence ‘The flower got red’ compares the redness of the flower previously and currently. However, Liu points out that this sentence does not allow a bare comparative interpretation; that is, the intended meaning ‘The flower got redder’ is not possible. Hence the predicate hong ‘red’ indicates a positive and categorical meaning. See footnote 8 for more discussion.
Mandarin does have a morpheme geng that can be glossed as ‘more’ or ‘even more’, but it is never obligatory.
Note that the post-adjectival measure phrase is obligatory in the transitive comparative. Also, the distribution of the transitive comparative is rather limited. Only adjectives that involve numerically-quantifiable scales such as gao ‘tall’ or da ‘old’ can be used in this construction; other gradable adjectives, such as congming ‘smart’, are not allowed in this construction
(i)
*Zhangsan congming
Lisi ji fen.
Zhangsan smart
Lisi some degree
Intended: ‘Zhangsan is a few degrees smarter than Lisi.’
As discussed in footnote 5, scholars have divided opinions about the interpretations of gradable adjectives in the change-of-state comparative. Grano (2012) argues that sentences such as (25) involves comparative interpretations following Kennedy and Levin’s (2008) analysis. Also, le here is analyzed as a perfective or change-of-state marker, rather than a sentence-final marker as analyzed in Liu (2010). In this particular example, the sentence with the degree expression liang cun ‘two inches’ does not indicate an exclusively categorical meaning; in other words, Zhangsan may still be short at the time of utterance. Without the degree expression, the categorical interpretation is still not exclusive. The difference in interpretation between (20) and (25) may be caused by the difference between color adjectives and other gradable adjectives. We will not go into more detail for now.
An example of derived comparative form is the English gradable adjective tall, of which the comparative form is taller. An example of periphrastic comparative form is the Spanish gradable adjective alto ‘high’, of which the comparative form is m´as alto.
That is, no quality-denoting word has in its denotation entities that are in the denotation of another quality-denoting word.
In their earlier work, Francez and Koontz-Garboden (2015) proposed a similar denotation for ka
(i)
〚kα〛 = λP λxλD.∃D z[π(x, z) ∧ P (z)]
In (i), D is a variable over sets of portions; \(\exists^{D}\) represents restriction of the existential quantifier over portions. This denotation is essentially identical with (34). Both denotations restrict the possible values of the domain to “sets of portions that form a left-bounded interval of a substance” (Francez and Koontz-Garboden 2015, p. 549) except that the latter uses the variable I explicitly to express the left-bounded intervals.
Here, Francez (2009) analyzes possessive NPs as generalized quantifiers.
This is similar to what Dixon (1982) called human propensity PC lexemes.
Li does not provide any detailed explanation on what |z| represents, although we can infer that it might be a function that converts substances/portions to degrees.
(61) and (66) demonstrate the same ambiguity as I discussed with gradable adjective cases in Sects. 2.2 and 2.3. For PC nominals, an overt degree expression such as ji fen ‘some extent’ makes the comparative meaning more salient, whereas sentences without overt degree expressions have a stronger categorical flavor.
The positive interpretation of this sentence is marginal or unacceptable among some native speakers. There might be dialectal variation or influence from the context.
An anonymous reviewer points out that there are more counterexamples apart from those presented above, including jianjie ‘opinion’, yanguang ‘vision’, and wenhua ‘culture’ etc. While I acknowledge that counterexamples exist and speakers may tolerate some PC nominals as bare possessive predicates in simple declarative clauses, it is worth noting that the frequencies of those counterexamples are very low. Also, those nouns are ambiguous between a PC nominal and a countable noun in the same way as shown in (70), and those sentences may have a non-gradable interpretation in the same way as in (71). Hence, those ‘counterexamples’ do not indicate that hen is optional in possessive PC sentences. Future corpus studies with more data as well as acceptability tests might be necessary to further evaluate the status of degree modifiers in this construction.
This denotation of possessive morpheme (78) is essentially similar to the denotation (49) proposed by Li (2017), except that Li argues for a single possessive morpheme for both PC nominals and mass nouns, which is achieved by proposing a sensitive dminimum, whereas the former proposes two possessive morphemes for PC nominals and mass nouns respectively. Also, Li’s (2017) analysis is in line with the first option; the result of her proposal is that both gradable adjectives such as gao ‘tall’ (7) and possessive PC phrases such as you zhihui ‘have wisdom’ (50) share the type 〈d, et〉. I did not adopt Li’s analysis due to other flaws in her proposal, as explained earlier.
Following this analysis, hen is actually modifying intervals of a quality rather than degrees; I will still call it a degree modifier in the rest of the manuscript in order to be consistent with the convention in the literature.
See Sect. 2.4 for more details. The obligatoriness of hen to block comparative interpretation with possessive PC phrases in simple declaratives will be elaborated in the next section.
This assumption is not adopted in more recent frameworks such as Heim and Kratzer (1998).
The distinction between adjectives and verbs in Mandarin remains a highly debatable issue. An anonymous reviewer points out that some scholars argue that Mandarin adjectives are stative verbs and should not be treated as a separate category (see Chao 1968; McCawley 1992 among others). However, many scholars have provided empirical evidence that support distinguishing the adjective category as well. Apart from the tests concerning the transitivity of adjectives and the reduplicative morphology (Huang et al. 2009) discussed in this section, another strong piece of evidence is that many adjectives are non-predicative, such as gongtong ‘common’; if they are truly verbs, they should be able to function as predicates (see Paul 2010 among others). My current proposal regards adjectives in Mandarin as a distinct syntactic category.
The assumption that ∅whether sits below T may seem to conflict with the general idea that the overt ‘whether’ is located at the Complementizer position. Grano (2012) argues that the covert morpheme ∅whether is a realization of Σ, a term for the locus of sentential negation and affirmation according to Laka (1990). Grano (2012) also points out that there is independent evidence in Mandarin that supports this assumption. For instance, it is possible to form polar questions using reduplicative morphology, as illustrated in (i), in which the predicate gao ‘tall’ is reduplicated with the negative infix bu:
(i)
Zhangsan gao bu
gao?
Zhangsan tall NEG tall
‘Is Zhangsan tall or not?’
Huang et al. (2009) refer to this construction as the A-not-A construction and argue that there is a morpheme intervening between the subject and the predicate, which gives rise to the interrogative interpretation of this construction. Grano (2012) argues that it is reasonable to assume that this morpheme is the realization of the ∅whether morpheme.
The status of prenominal adjectival modifiers in Mandarin has attracted some debate among scholars. Paul (2005) argues against the view that all prenominal adjectives are relative clauses by pointing out that some nongradable adjectives in Mandarin must appear in the shi…de construction when acting as predicates, but not when acting as prenominal modifiers, as illustrated in (ia) and (ib) below; the latter is hence better analyzed as attributive constructions:
(i)
a
Zhe-ge
panzi sh
fang de.
this-CL
plate COP
square DE
‘This plate is square.’
b.
(*shi) fang
(de) panzi
COP square
DE plate
‘square plate’
(Grano 2012, p. 544)
Following Paul (2005), Grano (2012) points out that only relative clauses can occur to the left of the numeral + classifier construction. As shown in the following examples, the adjective fang ‘square’ is allowed to the right of the numeral + classifier complex (iia), but not to the left (iib), whereas the true relative clause xin lai de ‘(who) newly arrived’ is allowed both to the left (iiib) and right (iiia) of the complex:
(ii)
a.
yi-ge
fang
(de) panzi
one-CL
square
DE plate
‘one square plate’
b.
*fang
(de) yi-ge
panzi
square
DE one-CL
plate
Intended: ‘one square plate’
(iii)
a
liang-ge [xin lai
de] laoshi
two-CL new come
DE teacher
‘Two teachers who have newly arrived’
b.
[xin lai
de] liang-ge laoshi
new come
DE two-CL teacher
‘Two teachers who have newly arrived’
(Yip and Rimmington 2004, as cited in Grano 2012, p. 544-545)
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Acknowledgements
This article was developed based on my qualifying paper submitted to the Department of Linguistics at Indiana University. I am especially grateful to my advisor, Professor Thomas Grano, for his advice throughout this project. I also would like to thank the reviewers as well as the editors for their critical questions and constructive suggestions. Some content and material has been presented at departmental workshops and seminars and I am grateful to the audiences for providing their helpful feedback.
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Zhang, Y. Nominal property concepts and substance possession in Mandarin Chinese. J East Asian Linguist 29, 393–434 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-020-09214-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-020-09214-8