Different types of subject-oriented adverbials in French and in Mandarin Chinese: A contrastive study
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Jian Courteaud Zhang
Abstract
This paper is concerned with the comparison of French adverbs derived with the morpheme -ment and Mandarin Chinese adverbs derived with the morpheme -di. Both morphemes are used to build sentence-oriented adverbs, most of which are susceptible of being interpreted as agent-oriented manner adverbs. However, in each language, some of these adverbs may have to be interpreted as speaker-oriented rather than agent-oriented, raising the question if their scope is not larger than the mere verbal lexeme and if they should not be classified as sentence adverbs. The paper first recalls basic facts about Chinese adverbial syntax, especially the existence of a devoted slot for di-adverbs in the clause, which means that several tests used for the functional classification of adverbs Standard Average European, most prominently detachment, are not available in Chinese. The issue of finding a cross-linguistically valid grid of comparison is addressed in the next section thanks to a comparative review of the literature on speaker- vs. agent-oriented ment- and di-adverbs. The preliminary classification obtained for Chinese is then confronted with a series of tests and compared with the taxonomy of French speaker- and agent-oriented adverbials. I contrast subject-predicate oriented adverbials, scoping over the subject and the predicate; subject-sentence adverbials, scoping over the subject and the propositional content, and subject-oriented descriptive adverbials, scoping only over the subject. Most crucially, the second class is available only in French, and not in Mandarin Chinese. Further, I show that in Chinese, the agentive lexical meaning of the verb may still exert semantic pressure on the licensing of the adverb even when it is speaker-oriented. In the conclusion, I point at converging facts from other Chinese adverbs exterior to the di-class.
Abstract
This paper is concerned with the comparison of French adverbs derived with the morpheme -ment and Mandarin Chinese adverbs derived with the morpheme -di. Both morphemes are used to build sentence-oriented adverbs, most of which are susceptible of being interpreted as agent-oriented manner adverbs. However, in each language, some of these adverbs may have to be interpreted as speaker-oriented rather than agent-oriented, raising the question if their scope is not larger than the mere verbal lexeme and if they should not be classified as sentence adverbs. The paper first recalls basic facts about Chinese adverbial syntax, especially the existence of a devoted slot for di-adverbs in the clause, which means that several tests used for the functional classification of adverbs Standard Average European, most prominently detachment, are not available in Chinese. The issue of finding a cross-linguistically valid grid of comparison is addressed in the next section thanks to a comparative review of the literature on speaker- vs. agent-oriented ment- and di-adverbs. The preliminary classification obtained for Chinese is then confronted with a series of tests and compared with the taxonomy of French speaker- and agent-oriented adverbials. I contrast subject-predicate oriented adverbials, scoping over the subject and the predicate; subject-sentence adverbials, scoping over the subject and the propositional content, and subject-oriented descriptive adverbials, scoping only over the subject. Most crucially, the second class is available only in French, and not in Mandarin Chinese. Further, I show that in Chinese, the agentive lexical meaning of the verb may still exert semantic pressure on the licensing of the adverb even when it is speaker-oriented. In the conclusion, I point at converging facts from other Chinese adverbs exterior to the di-class.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- List of abbreviations VII
- Introduction – Adverbs and adverbials: Categorial issues 1
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I Delimitational approaches
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1 Consistency of the class
- The incoherence of the English adverb class 29
- The subcategorization of English adverbs: A feature-based clustering approach 55
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2 Margins of the class
- Proteus: Adverbial multi-word expressions in Italian and their cognate counterparts in –mente 85
- Prenominal adverbs in German? The cases of auf and zu 109
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II Classificational approaches
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3 Adverbial scope: beyond the low / high dichotomy
- ‘Sentence adverbs’ don’t exist! 135
- Formal and functional features of modal adverbs in French and Modern Greek 167
- Different types of subject-oriented adverbials in French and in Mandarin Chinese: A contrastive study 195
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4 The case of domain adverb(ial)s
- Domain adverbials and morphology: The rivalry between -mäßig and -technisch in German 227
- Framing, segmenting, indexing: Towards a functional account of Romance domain adverbs in written texts 249
- List of contributors 277
- Index 279
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- List of abbreviations VII
- Introduction – Adverbs and adverbials: Categorial issues 1
-
I Delimitational approaches
-
1 Consistency of the class
- The incoherence of the English adverb class 29
- The subcategorization of English adverbs: A feature-based clustering approach 55
-
2 Margins of the class
- Proteus: Adverbial multi-word expressions in Italian and their cognate counterparts in –mente 85
- Prenominal adverbs in German? The cases of auf and zu 109
-
II Classificational approaches
-
3 Adverbial scope: beyond the low / high dichotomy
- ‘Sentence adverbs’ don’t exist! 135
- Formal and functional features of modal adverbs in French and Modern Greek 167
- Different types of subject-oriented adverbials in French and in Mandarin Chinese: A contrastive study 195
-
4 The case of domain adverb(ial)s
- Domain adverbials and morphology: The rivalry between -mäßig and -technisch in German 227
- Framing, segmenting, indexing: Towards a functional account of Romance domain adverbs in written texts 249
- List of contributors 277
- Index 279
