Specificity and Word Order in Child Mandarin
A well-known constraint on the mapping between referentiality and word order in Chinese is the prohibition of non-specific indefinite nominals from the subject position of a sentence (Chao 1968, Li and Thompson 1981, Zhu 1981), as shown in (1). This constraint has been variously linked to topic prominence, the lack of tense in the language, problems of existential closure, the distinction between NumP vs. DP, and the expression of thetic vs. categorical judgment (Lee 1986, Cheng 1991, Shyu 1995, Tsai 1994, 2001; Li 1997, 1998; Xu 1997, S.Huang 2004, Lu and Pan 2009). A second constraint on the mapping between specificity and word order in the language relates to the order of prenominal modifiers within a nominal. The nominal with the modifier following the numeral-classifier, called the Inner Modifier Nominal (IMN), can be understood as both specific or non-specific, while the nominal with the modifier preceding the numeral-classifier, called the Outer Modifier Nominal (OMN), can only be understood as specific (Huang 1982, Tsai 1994, Lu 1998, del Gobbo 2003, Zhang 2006). Thus, while IMN can occur in an existential sentence such as (2a), OMN cannot (2b).
Lee,Hun-Tak, Thomas Wu, Zhuang
The Chinese University of Hong Kong Xiangtan University
国内会议
光盘
英文
4-6
2011-12-10（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）