Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: Mandarin 'even', `all ' and the Trigger of Focus Movement This article proposes a syntax for Mandarin even/all constructions. We show that “focus movement ” under ‘even ’ is not deeply connected to semantic focus or stress, since the same movement occurs in the absence of focus or prosodic triggers. Rather, these movements are mediated by a feature shared across ‘even ’ and ‘all’ constructions, which we propose is the maximality feature on a potentially covert operator. This result, when placed alongside findings by Horvath (2007) and Cable (2007), supports the hypothesis that A-bar “focus movement ” is always operator-driven. The syntactic similarities between ‘even ’ and ‘all ’ in Mandarin suggest a semantics where ‘even ’ is built compositionally from a non-focus-sensitive ‘all ’ (dou) plus a scalar focus operator (lian). We present a preliminary semantics of this kind, and discuss some challenges it faces. Finally, we address “partial focus movement ” data that are initially unexpected on our account, and show how they can be incorporated under a framework that allows copy movement and PF deletion.
Authors: Noah Constant, Chloe Chenjie Gu
Institution: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1518511742