Common Verbs Are Uncommon: The Dynamics of Verbal Underspecification in Chinese

• 作者: Yicheng Wu
• 来源期刊: 语言与符号学研究
• 学科: 文学
• 年，卷（期）: 2015,（4）
• 页码范围: 52-79
• 页数: 28页
• 分类号: H04

摘要

Verbal underspecif ication in Chinese is manifested in the way verbs are lexically underspecif ied as to the number and the type of complements(i.e.,arguments and argument-like adjuncts)they can take.It is,on the one hand,a refl ex of the interaction between the lexicon,syntax and pragmatics,and on the other,a refl ex of the general semantic underspecifi cation of lexical items.Within the framework of Dynamic Syntax(Kempson et al.,2001;Cann et al.,2005)that allows the interaction between lexical,structural and pragmatic information during the syntactic process,I show that(i)the representation of predicate argument structure can be established dynamically at the level of propositional form which is constructed incrementally;(ii)just like semantically selected expressions,semantically unselected yet syntactically expressed expressions contribute to the enriched semantic composition(see Jackendoff,1997,2002;Zhang,2005 inter alia)that no abstract syntactic mechanisms need to be invoked for.