10337_9789813202900_tp.indd 1 17/11/16 9:51 AM b2530 International Strategic Relations and China’s National Security: World at the Crossroads TTTThhhhiiiissss ppppaaaaggggeeee iiiinnnntttteeeennnnttttiiiioooonnnnaaaallllllllyyyy lllleeeefffftttt bbbbllllaaaannnnkkkk b2530_FM.indd 6 01-Sep-16 11:03:06 AM 10337_9789813202900_tp.indd 2 17/11/16 9:51 AM Published by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. 5 Toh Tuck Link, Singapore 596224 USA office: 27 Warren Street, Suite 401-402, Hackensack, NJ 07601 UK office: 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Xu, Jie, author. Title: Formal aspects of Chinese grammar / Jie Xu. Description: New Jersey : World Scientific, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016053345| ISBN 9789813202900 | ISBN 9789813202917 (pbk) Subjects: LCSH: Chinese language--Grammar, Comparative. | Chinese language--Reflexives. | Chinese language--Grammar. Classification: LCC PL1099 .X8 2017 | DDC 495.15--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016053345 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2016 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission from the publisher. For photocopying of material in this volume, please pay a copying fee through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In this case permission to photocopy is not required from the publisher. Printed in Singapore Judy - Formal Aspects of Chinese Grammar.indd 1 04-01-17 5:18:19 PM Preface This book is a collection of articles published over the past decade by the author. These articles are concerned with various issues related to the formal aspects of Chinese grammar including possessor raising, null subject, null object, pied-piping in logical form, focus marker, question formation, and adverbial reflexive. Each article has made contribution to its topic. More importantly, these seven articles, taken as a whole, constitute a window through which readers may look at issues from a formal syntactic perspective and get a sense as to how work has been conducted in the framework in question, how arguments have been constructed, and how justification has been provided in the field. The title of this book “Formal Aspects of Chinese Grammar” reflects that the articles included in the book have all used the framework of formal grammar or formal syntax, especially that of generative grammar in a broad sense. Natural languages, of course, vary from one another. However, the scope and degree of cross-linguistic variation highly restricted by a preprogrammed human language faculty believed to consist of a set of principles that are universally applicable and a set of parameters, the values of which are to be set in each particular language. A single parameter setting may result in many superficial differences between languages. Yes, it is important for linguists to work hard and figure out the rules that work specifically in each particular language and for particular structures in the language. But, even more importantly, we need to dig deep and excavate the underlying principles and parameters that, together with some basic lexical and morphological properties, are responsible for deriving those language-particular and structure-particular rules. v 01_Preface.indd 5 14/11/2016 9:10:45 AM vi  Formal Aspects of Chinese Grammar These articles appear largely in their original form, especially in terms of their essential contents. Revisions are minimal and mainly technical, limited to the correction of grammatical errors and clarification of expressions. Such revisions are noted in a footnote on the first page of each article, together with relevant information and full acknowledgement of its original publication details. I would like to take this opportunity to offer my deep thanks to the Lee Foundation Singapore for a special publication grant through the Chinese and Oriental Languages Information Processing Society, and to Susanne DeVore, who proofread the whole book, page by page. Her comments and suggestions helped improve the quality of this publication. All remaining errors are solely mine. Jie Xu University of Macau Macau, China 22 August 2016 01_Preface.indd 6 14/11/2016 9:10:46 AM Contents Preface v Chapter 1 Possessor Raising in Chinese and Korean 1 Chapter 2 Two Types of Pre-Verbal Reflexives in Chinese 55 Chapter 3 The Positioning of Chinese Focus Marker SHI and Pied-Piping in Logical Form 64 Chapter 4 Two Types of Null Subject Languages 89 Chapter 5 Null Object and Its Syntactic Derivation 117 Chapter 6 The Interaction of Grammatical Features “Question” and “Focus” 140 Chapter 7 Focus-Marking in Chinese and Malay 170 References 183 Index 191 vii 02_Contents.indd 7 14/11/2016 9:12:02 AM b2530 International Strategic Relations and China’s National Security: World at the Crossroads TTTThhhhiiiissss ppppaaaaggggeeee iiiinnnntttteeeennnnttttiiiioooonnnnaaaallllllllyyyy lllleeeefffftttt bbbbllllaaaannnnkkkk b2530_FM.indd 6 01-Sep-16 11:03:06 AM 1 CChhaappteter r 1 Possessor Raising in Chinese and Korean* AbstrAct: A possessor NP may move out of the Spec position of a containing NP in some Asian languages, such as Chinese and Korean, yielding the so-called “Possessor Raising Construction.” From the perspective of a syntactic theory based on principles and parameters of Universal Grammar, rather than on differing sets of rules for particular languages, we argue in this chapter that the diverse Possessor Raising phenomena can well be subsumed along with “Passivization” and “Subject Raising” under the general syntactic process of “NP Movement.” The movement of Possessor Raising is driven by a functional motivation, which is to separate the possessor NP from the possession NP in order to emphasize the former. It has been demonstrated that the operation of Possessor Raising is well under the constraint of UG principles in interaction with independently explainable language- particular properties, in particular, it is mainly determined by the following three factors: (1) Whether the raised possessor NP can be properly Case-marked in its new site; (2) Whether the nominal residue left behind by the NP movement can be Case-marked; and (3) Whether other applicable conditions on movement such as the Subjacency can be satisfied. Most of our arguments are constructed on the basis of the analysis of a whole set of comparable language phenomena from Chinese, Korean and English, and those phenomena, most of which are well observed in the literature, are recast and explained in a very principled way. * A version of this chapter originally appeared with the same title in Languages in Contrast 5:2 (2005), pp. 245–290. Revisions made are technical and minimal, the essential contents remain unchanged. It is included in this monograph as a chapter with kind permission from John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia. [www.benjamins.com]. 1 Chap1.indd 1 14/11/2016 9:14:09 AM