Contextualized Existential Constructions in Mandarin Chinese

Kuo, Pei-Jung

doi:10.30961/lr.2022.58.3.177

Lang. Res. 58(3):177-203

pISSN: 0254-4474, eISSN: 2586-7113

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30961/lr.2022.58.3.177

Article

Contextualized Existential Constructions in Mandarin Chinese

Pei-Jung Kuo ¹ ^, ^†

Author Information & Copyright ▼

¹National Chiayi University

^†Corresponding Author:Professor Department of Foreign Languages National Chiayi University No.85, Wunlong Village, Minsyong Township, Chiayi County, Taiwan E-mail: domo@mail.ncyu.edu.tw

ⓒ Copyright 2022 Language Education Institute, Seoul National University. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Received: Jul 26, 2022 ; Revised: Oct 02, 2022 ; Accepted: Nov 07, 2022

Published Online: Dec 31, 2022

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes that in addition to the typical “out-of-the-blue” existential construction, a kind of contextualized existential construction exists in Mandarin Chinese. This form does not exhibit the predicate restriction observed in typical existential constructions cross-linguistically. It is argued that this type of existential construction involves a topic-comment structure and functions as a subtype of the Existential Coda Construction discussed by Zhang (2007, 2008). The current analysis also explains the apparent lack of a definiteness restriction for specific Mandarin Chinese existential constructions.

Keywords: existential construction; information structure; topic; predicate restriction; definiteness restriction

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