Reduplication and the structure of nouns in Xining Chinese
- PDF / 1,175,436 Bytes
- 36 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 82 Downloads / 156 Views
Reduplication and the structure of nouns in Xining Chinese Qi Wang1 · Anders Holmberg2
Received: 24 April 2019 / Accepted: 25 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In Xining Chinese, especially as used by older people, free nouns are always reduplicated, as a purely formal condition without any semantic effects. We argue that the reduplication takes place when an acategorial root is merged with a null nominal categorizer which copies the phonological matrix of the root, as an effect of a condition ruling out free monosyllabic nouns. When the condition is not independently satisfied, as in a compound or derived noun, reduplication is how the condition is met. Reduplication also occurs optionally in compounds or derived nouns. In conjunction with a minimalist theory of word formation, this will be shown to predict the distribution of reduplication in various contexts. For instance, the head of a compound can be reduplicated, but not the modifier, some affixes but not others permit reduplication of the base, non-compositional compounds do not allow reduplication, and so-called ‘bound roots’ (really, bound words) are not reduplicated. The phenomenon provides very strong evidence that simple content words are made up of an acategorial root and a categorizer which is often null, but can be overt in some languages, including Xining Chinese, where it is overt in nouns by virtue of reduplication. Keywords Root · Merge · Categorizer · Compound · Chinese · Reduplication
B A. Holmberg
[email protected] Q. Wang [email protected]
1
School of Foreign Languages and Literature, Wuhan University, Luojiashan, Wuchang Qu, Wuhan Shi, Hubei, 430072, China
2
School of English Literature, Language, and Linguistics, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK
Q. Wang, A. Holmberg
1 Introduction A morphological peculiarity of the variety of Chinese traditionally spoken in and around Xining in the northwest of China is that common nouns are always reduplicated, as exemplified in (1). (1)
a.
b.
c.
Jiá sa f¯ei féi h¯u li¯ao. she PRT water water drink PRF ‘She has drunk water.’ Jiá sa mˇo mó ha m¯ei hà zhei. she PRT steamed.bun steamed.bun OBL buy PRF PRT ‘She has bought steamed buns.’ Zhˇı gó d¯o d¯o sa hˇudú guˇei na. this CLF knife knife OBL very expensive PRT ‘This knife is very expensive.’
The reduplication has no semantic effect whatsoever, but is a purely formal requirement. In particular in the variety of Xining Chinese spoken by the older generation, which we will refer to as Traditional Xining Chinese, the reduplication is compulsory. Similar reduplication is common also in other dialects spoken in northwest China. Our data are exclusively from Traditional Xining Chinese, though, abbreviated TXC (called Old Xining Chinese in Wang 2018).1 The reduplication, we claim, is required to satisfy a language-particular condition that a free noun must consist of at least two syllables. There is a well-known tendency in Chinese to favour disyllabic words over monosyllabic ones (Duanmu 1999). An effect
Data Loading...
