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The Aspect-Sensitive Agent Omission in Mandarin by Yan Zhang at Abbey's Bookshop,
The Aspect-Sensitive Agent Omission in Mandarin
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Yan Zhang

The Aspect-Sensitive Agent Omission in Mandarin

Yan Zhang

$78.95   $67.48

Paperback

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English
Springer Nature Switzerland AG
26 April 2025
Historical & comparative linguistics
Series: SpringerBriefs in Linguistics
This open access book aims to provide an explanatory account for the phenomenon of absent external arguments in Mandarin Chinese. It starts from the observation that although expletivizing an agent is considered impossible cross-linguistically, it is possible in Mandarin. To account for this exceptional behavior, it proposes the M parameter, which suggests that English and Chinese differ in whether the agentive entailments of the root are grammatically codified in selection for the feature [+m]. While the M parameter provides a grammatical basis for when omission of the external argument is possible in a given language, this book argues that expletivization in general is subject to a variant of the Proper Containment Condition (Rappaport Hovav and Levin, 2012), which is dubbed the Aspectual Proper Containment Condition (APCC). The APCC is concerned with the relation between the interval yielded by aspect and the situation in the speaker/hearer’s mental model that obtains during that interval. It requires that the external argument be eliminated if and only if its referent does not participate in the situation in the mental model during that interval. This open access book demonstrates that in the vast majority of cases the APCC correctly predicts agent omission in Mandarin sentences containing one of the four aspectual markers (-zai, -zhe, -le, and -guo), with a few exceptions where additional restrictions are at play.
By:  
Imprint:   Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Country of Publication:   Switzerland
Dimensions:   Height: 235mm,  Width: 155mm, 
ISBN:   9789819629862
ISBN 10:   9819629861
Series:   SpringerBriefs in Linguistics
Pages:   148
Publication Date:  
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Further / Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Yan Zhang is Assistant Professor in School of Foreign Languages at Jiangsu University at Zhenjiang, China. She finished her PhD in Linguistics from University College London in 2022. Her current research interests focus on the syntactic structure of Chinese in the framework of Generative Grammar, especially argument structure and aspects.

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