The possessive morphosyntactic strategy of gradable predication in Taiwanese Southern Min and the measure function

The TSM u N construction adopts the possessive morphosyntactic strategy of gradable predication to construct a gradable predicate headed by the possessive verb u ‘have’. The possessive verb u ‘have’ inside, in addition to retaining its possessive meaning, introduces a functional projection (i.e., Me...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of East Asian linguistics 2022-06, Vol.31 (2), p.179-220
Main Author: Liu, Chen-Sheng Luther
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Chinese
Comparative Linguistics
Japanese
Language and Literature
Linguistics
Social Sciences
Theoretical Linguistics
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Summary:The TSM u N construction adopts the possessive morphosyntactic strategy of gradable predication to construct a gradable predicate headed by the possessive verb u ‘have’. The possessive verb u ‘have’ inside, in addition to retaining its possessive meaning, introduces a functional projection (i.e., MeasP) headed by Meas , which denotes a measure function measuring the denotation of the N component along the dimension of cardinality or quantity. Depending on whether the N component is an abstract noun or a non-abstract noun, the measure scale associated with the gradable u N predicate can be an interval one or a ratio one. This study has the following implications. First, many languages might use the possessive or existential verb to construct a gradable possessive verbal predicate; however, they might differ from each other in the semantic function the possessive or existential verb plays. Second, a TSM PC nominal does not denote a scale resulting from the total preorder ≤. Third, a TSM gradable adjective is lexically specified with a scale.
ISSN:0925-8558
1572-8560
DOI:10.1007/s10831-022-09238-2