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Duration Phrases as Fake Nominal Quantifiers: A Functional Account with Corpus Evidence

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 14515))

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Abstract

The study reexamines the grammatical status and function of the duration phrase in the V-DurP-de-NP structure wo du le santian de shu ‘I read books for three days.’ The DurP, semantically a verbal complement, is taken to be a fake nominal quantifier through a syntactic test. The puzzling form-meaning mismatch in the expression is justified from a functional perspective with corpus evidence. The study proposes that the DurP is incorporated into the object-NP to serve as an event delimiter. It is coerced into a typically nonreferential object to meet the “heavy added information constraint” hypothesized by Chafe [1]. The event-delimiting function is evidenced by the fact that DurPs are mutually exclusive with other event-delimiting measures, which is supported by corpus evidence on the referential properties of the involved NPs. This study provides new insight into the form-function pairing relation of the construction.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Example sentences (1a–c) are quoted from Huang [3] and glossed by the authors.

  2. 2.

    We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for the suggestion on clarifying the concept of “event delimiter”.

  3. 3.

    Our hearty thanks go to one of the anonymous reviewers who raised questions that whether this analysis can be extended to other fake nominal modifiers and if a unified account for them is possible. Fake nominal modifiers in Chinese are of diverse nature. For example, six types of them have been mentioned in Shen [4]. Considering their different positions in the clause and their different collocational behaviors, we do not attempt to address them all with one unified account and reserve this analysis only for the fake nominal quantifiers at the present stage. A unified analysis will surely be a significant contribution to the field. Hopefully, this research gap can be bridged by future studies.

  4. 4.

    The sentence becomes felicitous if the particle de is deleted. However, without de, the DurP is an adverbial of the sentence instead of a fake nominal modifier, which is out of the scope of the present study. Although example (5) is good under a relative clause reading, it is not the concern of the study.

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Acknowledgments

The first author is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities. Project number: 2019QY010.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Foreign Language Education, Jilin University, Changchun, China

    Xiaopei Zhang

  2. Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Republic of China

    Meichun Liu

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  1. Xiaopei Zhang
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  2. Meichun Liu
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Correspondence to Xiaopei Zhang .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore, Singapore

    Minghui Dong

  2. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jia-Fei Hong

  3. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Jingxia Lin

  4. Leshan Normal University, Leshan, China

    Peng Jin

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Zhang, X., Liu, M. (2024). Duration Phrases as Fake Nominal Quantifiers: A Functional Account with Corpus Evidence. In: Dong, M., Hong, JF., Lin, J., Jin, P. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14515. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-0586-3_35

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-0586-3_35

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-97-0585-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-97-0586-3

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