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Article published In:
Language and Linguistics
Vol. 18:1 (2017) ► pp.141–176

Fake attributives in Chinese

A prosodic grammar perspective

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Fake attributives in Chinese are the result of the interaction between syntax and prosody. For syntactic reasons, certain objects of complex verbal constructions and verbal quantifiers cannot be realized in situ; but they can be spelled out in some roundabout ways, one of which is to form fake attributives through de-insertion. In the forming process of fake attributives, the clitic de plays an important role, and de-insertion is frequently resorted to in facilitating the correspondence between the phonological structure and the syntactic structure, with the aim of ensuring meaning conveyance. It is concluded that fake attributives are initiated, to some extent, by mismatches between syntactic and phonological structure and derived when de is inserted to enhance their correspondence.
Keywords: fake attributive, prosodic grammar, interface, mapping, de
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous studies on fake attributives
    • 2.1Huang’s account
    • 2.2Tang’s account
    • 2.3Liu’s account
    • 2.4Cheng et al.’s account
    • 2.5Some inspirations drawn from previous studies
  • 3.Theoretical framework of the present study
  • 4.The formation of fake attributives
    • 4.1.Syntactic motivation for the formation of fake attributives
    • 4.2The nature of de
      • 4.2.1 De as a boundary marker
      • 4.2.2 De as a clitic
    • 4.3Derivation of fake attributives
    • 4.4Occurrence of de: further discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 12 January 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.18.1.05zhu
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