Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics
- Cambridge Handbooks In Language and Linguistics
- The Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Part One Writing System/Neuro-cognitive Processing of Chinese
- Part Two Morpho-lexical Issues in Chinese
- 3 Wordhood and Disyllabicity in Chinese
- 4 Characters as Basic Lexical Units and Monosyllabicity in Chinese
- 5 Parts of Speech in Chinese and How to Identify Them
- 6 Gaps in Parts of Speech in Chinese and Why?
- 7 Derivational and Inflectional Affixes in Chinese and Their Morphosyntactic Properties
- 8 The Extreme Poverty of Affixation in Chinese
- 9 On an Integral Theory of Word Formation in Chinese and Beyond
- 10 Compounding Is Semantics-driven in Chinese
- Part Three Phonetic-phonological Issues in Chinese
- Part Four Syntax-semantics, Pragmatics, and Discourse Issues
- Index
- References
6 - Gaps in Parts of Speech in Chinese and Why?
from Part Two - Morpho-lexical Issues in Chinese
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2022
- The Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics
- Cambridge Handbooks In Language and Linguistics
- The Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Part One Writing System/Neuro-cognitive Processing of Chinese
- Part Two Morpho-lexical Issues in Chinese
- 3 Wordhood and Disyllabicity in Chinese
- 4 Characters as Basic Lexical Units and Monosyllabicity in Chinese
- 5 Parts of Speech in Chinese and How to Identify Them
- 6 Gaps in Parts of Speech in Chinese and Why?
- 7 Derivational and Inflectional Affixes in Chinese and Their Morphosyntactic Properties
- 8 The Extreme Poverty of Affixation in Chinese
- 9 On an Integral Theory of Word Formation in Chinese and Beyond
- 10 Compounding Is Semantics-driven in Chinese
- Part Three Phonetic-phonological Issues in Chinese
- Part Four Syntax-semantics, Pragmatics, and Discourse Issues
- Index
- References
Summary
This article compares the presence of some functional categories which are at play in English or in French to their absence in Mandarin. It shows that rather than being ‘absent’ these categories are inactive, due to the analyticity of the language. For instance, Mandarin ‘lacks’ (i) subject–verb agreement, (ii) plural markers on nouns, (iii) a complementizer as a head of a clause in subject or in object position, and (iv) verb gapping.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics , pp. 114 - 134Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022