Nominal property concepts and substance possession in Mandarin Chinese
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Nominal property concepts and substance possession in Mandarin Chinese Yiwen Zhang1
Received: 20 October 2019 / Accepted: 29 June 2020 / Published online: 24 November 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This paper investigates two puzzles regarding property concept (PC) lexemes (Dixon in Where have all the adjectives gone? And other essays in semantics and syntax. Mouton, The Hague, 1982) in Mandarin: why degree modifiers such as hen ‘very’ are compatible with gradable adjectives such as gao ‘tall’ as well as PC nominals such as zhihui ‘wisdom’, but not with concrete mass nouns such as shui ‘water’ in simple declarative clauses, and why degree modifiers are obligatory to block comparative interpretation in sentences with gradable adjectives and possessive PC nominal phrases. I demonstrate the data of PC nominals in possessive constructions with positive and comparative interpretations. Following Francez and Koontz-Garboden (Semantics and morphosyntactic variation: qualities and the grammar of property concepts. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017), I argue that PC nominals and other mass nouns in Mandarin are semantically distinct in such a way that the latter lack inherent measures. Furthermore, I argue that gradable adjectives and possessive PC nominal phrases are model-theoretically equivalent. Moreover, I propose that degree modifiers such as hen are compulsory to block comparative interpretations in PC sentences because possessive PC phrases are Adjective Phrases and require an overt degree modifier or a covert comparative operator to satisfy the T[+V] constraint in Mandarin proposed by Grano (Nat Lang Linguist Theory 30:513–565, 2012). Keywords Property concepts · Mandarin · Abstract mass nouns · Possession · Gradability · Comparison
& Yiwen Zhang [email protected] 1
Department of Linguistics, Indiana University, Ballantine Hall 844, 1020 E. Kirkwood Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA
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Y. Zhang
1 Introduction Property Concept lexemes (PC lexemes) are defined as a class of expressions that are realized as adjectives in languages that have such a category (Dixon 1982; Thompson 1989). Francez and Koontz-Garboden (2015) show that, cross-linguistically, there are two morphosyntactic types of PC lexemes: adjectives in predicative sentences, and abstract nominals (henceforth PC nominals) that occur in possessive constructions. In Mandarin Chinese, both types of PC lexemes are found, as illustrated in (1) and (2) respectively: (1) Zhangsan hen gao. [Adjectives] Zhangsan very tall ‘Zhangsan is (very) tall.’1 (2) Zhangsan hen you zhihui. [Nominals] Zhangsan very POSS wisdom ‘Zhangsan has (a lot of) wisdom/is (very) wise.’ The purpose of this paper is to solve two puzzles surrounding PC lexemes in Mandarin Chinese. The first puzzle, as first observed by Li (2017), concerns why degree modifiers such as hen are compatible with gradable adjectives such as gao ‘tall’ in (1) and PC nominals such as zhihui ‘wisdom’ in (2), but not with non-PC, concrete mass nouns such as shui ‘water’ in (3) below2: (3) Zha
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