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