Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics

This lemma discusses the acquisition of word order and phrase structure in early child Chinese (primarily in Mandarin), focusing on the following aspects of word order and phrase structure. First, with no case markers, Chinese crucially relies on word order for marking grammatical functions such as subject and object. The canonical word order, though not uncontroversially (see below), is SVO, i.e., the verb phrase branches to the right so that the verb precedes its object complement, but both OS…

1. Does Chinese Have a Separate Word Class for Adjectives? The first question one must address when describing adjectives in Chinese is whether there is this word class in this language. In so much as morphological markings help distinguish word classes, as is often the case with Indo-European languages, we need to turn elsewhere, for Chinese does not have rich morphological markings. There are two opposing views on the answer to this question. The first view adopts what we would call the adjectives-as-verbs hypothesis, which is espoused by scholars who be…

In descriptions of Mandarin grammar, the term "excessive" ( piānlí 偏離) refers to the semantics denoted by the combination of a verb (V) and an open scale gradable adjective (A) in the sense that they sometimes express that there is too much of the property the adjective denotes, in any case, more than the speaker expected or thought necessary (Lù 1990, Mǎ and Lù 1997), as exemplified by (1a). The excessive meaning of such VA phrases is often contrasted with the more typical action-result meaning of resultative VA phrases, such as xǐ gānjing 洗幹淨 ‘wash-clean’. 1. a. 這所房子蓋小了。     Zhè  suǒ   fángz…

Adposition is a general term to cover preposition and postposition. A preposition precedes its NP complement, whereas a postposition follows its NP complement. This entry addresses the issue whether Chinese has prepositions in section 1, and the issue whether the language has postpositions in section 2.  1. Prepositions 1.1 Preposition as an independent category Chinese has many prepositions. Some examples in Mandarin are listed in (1) (see Chao 1968:768–769) (all Chinese examples in this entry are from this variety of the language). 1. chúle 除了 ‘except for, besides, in addition’  …

As is usual practice in the literature, the term adverb here refers both to adverbs qua part of speech (e.g., yě 也 ‘also’, zài 再 ‘again’, dàgài 大概 ‘probably’, kěxī 可惜 ‘unfortunately’) and to adjunct phrases, i.e., Noun Phrases (NPs), Prepositional Phrases (PPs) and Postpositional Phrases (PostPs) having an adverbial function (e.g., měi tiān 每天 ‘every day’, cóng zhèr 從這兒 ‘from here’, gēn Āměi 跟阿美 ‘with Āměi’, yuánzé shàng 原則上 ‘in principle’). Unless indicated otherwise, they are treated as one group.   Adverbs in Mandarin Chinese are excluded from postverbal positions, i.e., b…

BOLTZ, William, University of Washington, Seattle, United States.CHENG, Lisa Lai-Shen, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands.CHEUNG, Samuel, University of California, Berkeley, United States.FENG, Shengli, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong.HUANG, Chu-jen, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong.KLÖTER, Henning, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.LEE, Thomas Hun-tak, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong.LIN, Jo-wang, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan.LIN, Yen-hwei, Michigan State University…