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Attributional versus identificational: A dichotomous analysis of appositives in Mandarin Chinese

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 August 2022

JING JIN Open the ORCID record for JING JIN [Opens in a new window]
JING JIN*
Affiliation:
Department of Chinese Language Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong, 10 Lo Ping Road, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong [email protected]
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Abstract

Among various types of nominal phrases, the appositive construction has long been a relatively under-researched subject in the literature of Chinese linguistics. This paper centers on the use of the appositive construction [P(ronoun)-Num(eral)-Cl(assifier)-Nominal Phrase (NP)] in Mandarin Chinese. Upon revealing a series of asymmetries in syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, this paper proposes an attributional versus identificational distinction for Chinese appositives. Specifically, for the attributional case, the apposition (i.e. [Num-Cl-NP]) is property-denoting and serves to rationalize the speaker’s evaluation about the referent denoted by the anchor (i.e. the P); for the identificational case, the apposition is individual-denoting and serves to facilitate referent identification of the anchor by picking out an identifiable quantified set of discourse referents from the given context. To formally capture this distinction, this paper develops a dichotomous analysis for the syntax of Chinese appositives. The non-unified treatment not only offers an effective explanation for the asymmetries exhibited by the appositives under different cases, but also contributes to a better understanding of Chinese appositives in general.

Keywords

appositive constructionMandarin Chinesenominal phrasestructural ambiguity
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 59 , Issue 4 , November 2023 , pp. 763 - 794
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Part of this paper was presented at the 6th Symposium on Chinese Syntax and Semantics (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 25–27 November 2017). My sincere gratitude goes to Prof. James Huang, who has offered insightful feedback on an earlier version of this work. I also thank the three anonymous reviewers of Journal of Linguistics for their critical and helpful comments, which helped the manuscript to improve a lot. All the remaining errors are mine. The author declares no conflict of interests.

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