Chapter published in:
New Explorations in Chinese Theoretical Syntax: Studies in honor of Yen-Hui Audrey Li
Edited by Andrew Simpson
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 272] 2022
► pp. 293–300

Head dependency and degree words in Mandarin

| National Chung Cheng University
In Mandarin Chinese, the degree word ji ‘extremely’ can occur either to the left of a gradable expression, like other degree words, or at the end of a sentence, followed by the particle le. Meanwhile, head dependencies have been recognized to be either syntactic or non-syntactic, and syntactic head dependencies can be established by either a movement chain or a non-movement dependency. This short paper argues for two dependencies in the ji-final construction in Mandarin: one is seen in the syntactic Focus Agree dependency of the non-temporal sentence-final le, and the other is seen in the non-syntactic head dependency of the degree word ji.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Observations on ji in the JI-LE construction
  • 3.Observations on S-le in the JI-LE construction
  • 4.The head dependencies in the JI-LE construction
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 April 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.272.10zha
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