Revisiting donkey anaphora in Mandarin Chinese
In their article published in this journal,
Pan and Jiang (2015)
challenge the claims and proposals made in
Cheng and Huang (1996) concerning both the
distributional patterns and interpretive strategies for donkey anaphora in Mandarin conditional. They claim that all three types
of conditionals (
rúguǒ-, dōu- and bare conditionals) allow either a
wh-phrase or a pronoun in
the consequent clause, and that both the
wh-phrase and the pronoun may be either unselectively bound or
interpreted by the E-type strategy. We show that, except for an observation already mentioned and accommodated in
Cheng and Huang’s (1996) analysis of
rúguǒ-conditionals, their
distributional claims are incorrect. It is also shown that the interpretative flexibility they propose is untenable, as it leaves
a number of otherwise well-predicted properties unaccounted for.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The distributional patterns
- 2.1
Cheng and Huang (1996)
- 2.2
Pan and Jiang (2015)
- 3.Dissecting P&J’s patterns
- 3.1
Rúguǒ-conditionals
- 3.2
Dōu-conditionals
- 3.3Bare conditionals
- 4.Interpreting wh-phrases and pronouns
- 4.1Interpreting wh-phrases
- 4.2Interpreting pronouns
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
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Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Pan, Haihua & Hang Kuang
2023.
Another Look at Chinese Donkey Sentences: A Reply to Cheng and Huang (2020). In
Dynamics in Logic and Language [
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 13524],
► pp. 25 ff.
![DOI logo](//benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
Li, Yurong, Peng Zhou & Mingming Liu
2021.
Donkey pronouns in child Mandarin: Insights into the ∃/∀ dichotomy.
Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 6:1
![DOI logo](//benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
Zhang, Niina Ning
2021.
Pairing Degree-WH Clauses in Mandarin.
Studies in Chinese Linguistics 42:2
► pp. 121 ff.
![DOI logo](//benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
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