Abstract
This study provides a hybrid account of the Mandarin “ni ge NP” structure. It is the expressivity that yields its syntactic and semantic effects. In the descriptive dimension, ge serves as a relation function that builds a similarity relation between the hearer and the property that the NP denotes, which explains that NPs cannot co-refer with a possible discourse participant in many cases. In the expressive dimension, ge conveys the speaker’s subjective judgments, which correctly predicts its resistance to an honorific form as well as the semantic restrictions.
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I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to the anonymous reviewers and the editors for helpful suggestions and comments on earlier versions of this paper. This work is financially supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China under grant #21CYY028. The author alone is responsible for any errors and mistakes in this paper.
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Liu, F. (2023). A Hybrid Account of the Expressivity in Mandarin Nominals. In: Su, Q., Xu, G., Yang, X. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13495. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28953-8_13
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