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Part of
Existential Constructions across Languages: Forms, meanings and functions
Edited by Laure Sarda and Ludovica Lena
[Human Cognitive Processing 76] 2023
► pp. 245–282

Chapter 8
Partition and existence

The case of you ren ‘there’s someone, there are people’ in Chinese

ORCID logo | Xiamen University | CRLAO (INALCO/EHESS/CNRS)

This contribution concerns Chinese biclausal constructions introduced by the existential verb yǒu and including the bare noun rén ‘person, people’ in the pivotal position. Building upon spoken corpus data, I show that the co-occurrence of an individual-level predicate in the coda exerts a coercion on the reading of the pivot which is then interpreted as generic-partitive. I argue that, in such cases, the yǒu-construction is not used to signal referent unidentifiability. Rather, the biclausal pattern allows to prevent the bare noun rén from acquiring the universal interpretation (‘all people’) that it receives by default in the preverbal-subject position. These sentences are used to express the literal existence, namely the existence of a “subtype of people”.

Keywords: bare noun, biclausal construction, coercion, coda, genericity, spoken data
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.State-of-the-art
    • 2.1Chinese biclausal yǒu-constructions: Discourse-functional properties
    • 2.2The semantic and referential properties of the pivotal bare nouns
  • 3.The semantic interpretation of the pivot in [you ren V2] constructions
    • 3.1The existential verb yǒu [have] and the explicitly partitive form yǒude [have.sub] ‘some’
    • 3.2The specific vs. partitive reading of the pivot rén ‘person, people’
    • 3.3Generic-partitive vs. Anaphoric-partitive pivots
  • 4.Factors triggering a G-partitive or specific reading of the pivot
    • 4.1The verb of the coda: S-level vs. I-level predicates
    • 4.2The grammatical aspect
      • 4.2.1Perfective suffix -le
      • 4.2.2Experiential suffix -guo
      • 4.2.3Imperfective suffix -zhe
    • 4.3Explicit spatiotemporal reference
    • 4.4The discourse context
  • 5.Semantic universality vs. discourse-pragmatic identifiability
  • 6.The [you ren V2] construction in habitual and modal environments
    • 6.1Quantifying adverbs
    • 6.2The deontic modality
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 5 July 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.76.08len
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