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Article published In:
Asian Languages and Linguistics
Vol. 2:2 (2021) ► pp.217–248

The property concepts and the possessive verb Ū ‘Have’ in Taiwan Southern Min

| University of Ottawa

This paper delineates an alternative analysis of the property concepts of ū ‘have’ in Taiwan Southern Min, claiming that the complements serve syntactically as the nominal gradabilities through three syntactic (constituency) tests, and supported by a crosslinguistic perspective. Additionally, in the vein of Distributed Morphology, the gradability functions as an nP (also as a nominalization), in contrast with NP/DP. From a typological perspective, it is not peculiar for ū to select a nominalization of property concept to signal a reading of property-denoting. Moreover, I illustrate the semantics of a possessive property concept construction in Taiwan Southern Min, according to Francez and Koontz-Garboden (2015, 2017). I further propose a modal aspectual semantics to interpret the various temporal readings of ū. Finally, I draw a conclusion to my alternative analyses.

Keywords: property concept, possessive construction, gradability, nominalization, modal-aspectual
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Whether the gradable complement is an adjective?
  • 3.The analysis of nominalization
    • 3.1Three syntactic tests
      • 3.1.1Kind classifier test
      • 3.1.2Topicalization
      • 3.1.3Coordination test
    • 3.2More robust observations
    • 3.3The analysis of Distributed Morphology
    • 3.4A typological perspective
    • 3.5Puzzles
  • 4.The semantics of possessive property concepts
  • 5.The analysis of temporal modal
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 27 January 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/alal.21013.che
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