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Article published In:
Asian Languages and Linguistics
Vol. 2:2 (2021) ► pp.167–216

Judge-dependence in quality nouns

A semantic analysis of the Mandarin Chinese “you NP” structure

| Michigan State University

By combining the idea of property concepts and the kernel-based theory of subjectivity, this paper proposes an analysis of the otherwise mysterious behavior of the Mandarin “you” predicates, where subjectivity/evidentiality and possessive/attributive readings come and go in an intricate way. The paper presents a phenomenon of Mandarin called possessive Property Concept predicates, involving a possessive morpheme you “have” and a bare NP. Studying the subjectivity puzzle in Chinese advances our understanding of information source and information force in the following way. The Chinese fact, as a separate element, is part of the bigger picture about subjectivity. To explain how the subjectivity predicate as a natural class connects with evidentiality, this paper provides an approach to probe subjectivity through examining the information source change, which is derived from removing or adding evidential morpheme(s).

Keywords: quality noun, subjectivity, evidentials, information source versus information force, possessive constructions, Chinese ‘you’ structure, relative truth, formal semantics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous studies on judge-dependence
    • 2.1Diagnostics of taste predicates
    • 2.2Non-indexical relativism and other alternatives
    • 2.3Key assumptions
  • 3.A natural class expressing relative truth
    • 3.1Identifying the ssubjective ‘you NP’
    • 3.2More about subjectivity, evidentiality, and directness
    • 3.3Evidentiality and the ganjue-dao test
  • 4.Quality denoting noun
    • 4.1Quality noun vs. non-quality noun
    • 4.2Quality noun vs. mass noun
    • 4.3Expansion to the Chinese data
  • 5.Theoretical landscape
    • 5.1Connecting possessive property concept with you NP
    • 5.2Using kernel to formalize the ‘direct’ proposal
  • 6.Proposed analysis
    • 6.1Denotations and computations
    • 6.2Predictions and complications
  • 7.Summary and future studies
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • Abbreviations and gloss conventions used
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 27 January 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/alal.21007.con
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