Chia-yin Hu - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Chia-yin Hu

It has been established that polarity antonyms can participate in similar syntactic patterns (e.g... more It has been established that polarity antonyms can participate in similar syntactic patterns (e.g. Levin 1993). For example, The amount is increasing/decreasing and They won/lost the game . Interesting enough is the pair of the Chinese polarity antonyms, sheng 'to win; to defeat sb.' and bai 'to lose; to be defeated by sb.', which do not exhibit such parallel syntactic structures. In the events of winning and losing, there are at least two opposing parties in which one wins and the other loses. Let the winning party be "A" and the losing party "B". In Mandarin Chinese, the propositions "A sheng B" and "A bai B" can refer to the exact event, rather than two opposing situations. Such apparent counterexamples to the common belief about antonyms exhibiting similar syntactic distributions have actually been noted and discussed in a pioneering work by Lu (1987). The present paper moves further to investigate the issue from the genera...

This study investigates the discourse-pragmatic properties of ditransitive constructions in Engli... more This study investigates the discourse-pragmatic properties of ditransitive constructions in English, Mandarin Chinese (MC) and Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) based on argument realization patterns of the ditransitive objects in discourse contexts. The specific focuses are on the conditioning factors of two linguistic phenomena: word ordering variation and argument omission. Three main corpus-based observations are developed. First, the favored positions of overt objects were found to be largely conditioned by the informational-statuses they carry. Second, contra to the traditional prescriptive view that English, which is a non-pro-drop language, does not allow zero pronominals in the argument positions of finite clauses, under closer observation, the data reveals that even in English, ditransitive arguments carrying Hearer-Old, Discourse-Old or Inferrable information can surface as zero anaphora, given that recoverability of unexpressed elements can be carried out by addressees provid...

The paper explores an interesting case where two distinct patterns of excessive predication are a... more The paper explores an interesting case where two distinct patterns of excessive predication are apt to be mistaken as a free grammatical alternation without a semantic change. The patterns involve the use of an excessive marker si 'die', in predicating an extreme emotion, as in Wo xianmu si ta de haoyun le 'I am envious of his good luck to death.' vs. Ta de haoyun xianmu si wo le 'His good luck made me envious of him to death.' Different from traditional approaches to the seeming form-meaning mismatch, this paper proposes that the two highly correlated expressions be viewed as two distinct ”constructions” defined in the notion of Construction Grammar (Kay & Fillmore 1999, Goldberg 1995, 2006): Excessive Degree Construction (EDC) vs. Excessive Impact Construction (EIC). The two constructions arise from two types of grammatical packaging in response to two different semantic perspectives. The degree-measuring EDC profiles an Experiencer-to-Stimulus relation, co...

This dissertation investigates the discourse-pragmatic properties of ditransitive constructions i... more This dissertation investigates the discourse-pragmatic properties of ditransitive constructions in English, Mandarin Chinese (MC) and Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) based on argument realization patterns of the ditransitive objects in discourse contexts. The specific focuses are on the conditioning factors of two linguistic phenomena: word ordering variation and argument omission. Three main corpus-based observations are developed. The first observation concerns the cross-linguistic differences in the grammatical packaging of the direct objects (DOs) and the indirect objects (IOs) of ditransitive verbs. Specifically, the favored positions of overt objects were found to be largely conditioned by the informational-statuses they carry. In English, the Double Object Construction (DOC) introduces Discourse-New DOs, while the Prepositional Dative Construction (PDC) introduces Discourse-Old DOs. In MC and TSM, on the other hand, Discourse-New DOs occur in both the DOC and the PDC, while Disc...

Abstract. It has been established that polarity antonyms can participate in similar syntactic pat... more Abstract. It has been established that polarity antonyms can participate in similar syntactic patterns (e.g. Levin 1993). For example, The amount is increasing/decreasing and They won/lost the game. Interesting enough is the pair of the Chinese polarity antonyms, sheng ‘to win; to defeat sb.’ and bai ‘to lose; to be defeated by sb.’, which do not exhibit such parallel syntactic structures. In the events of winning and losing, there are at least two opposing parties in which one wins and the other loses. Let the winning party be “A ” and the losing party “B”. In Mandarin Chinese, the propositions “A sheng B ” and “A bai B ” can refer to the exact event, rather than two opposing situations. Such apparent counterexamples to the common belief about antonyms exhibiting similar syntactic distributions have actually been noted and discussed in a pioneering work by Lü (1987). The present paper moves further to investigate the issue from the generative grammar, arguing that the transitivity ...