Linguistik-Klassifikation: Syntax
24 search hits
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Adjectives in Qiang
(2004)
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Randy J. LaPolla
Chenglong Huang
- Qiang is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by 70,000-80,000 people in Northern Sichuan Province, China, classified as being in the Qiang or Tibetan nationality by the Chinese government. The language is verb final, agglutinative (prefixing and suffixing), and has both head-marking and dependent-marking morphology.
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An overview of Sino-Tibetan morphosyntax
(2003)
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Randy J. LaPolla
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Arguments against 'subject' and 'direct object' as viable concepts in Chinese
(1993)
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Randy J. LaPolla
- Thirty-one years ago Tsu-lin Mei (1961) argued against the traditional doctrine that saw the subject-predicate distinction in grammar as parallel to the particular- universal distinction in logic, as he said it was a reflex of an Indo-European bias, and could not be valid, as ‘Chinese ... does not admit a distinction into subject and predicate’ (p. 153). This has not stopped linguists working on Chinese from attempting to define ‘subject’ (and ‘object’) in Chinese. Though a number of linguists have lamented the difficulties in trying to define these concepts for Chinese (see below), most work done on Chinese still assumes that Chinese must have the same grammatical features as Indo-European, such as having a subject and a direct object, though no attempt is made to justify that view. This paper challenges that view and argues that there has been no grammaticalization of syntactic functions in Chinese. The correct assignment of semantic roles to the constituents of a discourse is done by the listener on the basis of the discourse structure and pragmatics (information flow, inference, relevance, and real world knowledge) (cf. Li & Thompson 1978, 1979; LaPolla 1990).
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Chinese as a topic-comment (not topic-prominent and not SVO) language
(2009)
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Randy J. LaPolla
- Many linguists in China and the West have talked about Chinese as a topic-comment language, that is, a language in which the structure of the clause takes the form of a topic, about which something is to be said, and a comment, which is what is said about the topic, rather than being a language with a subject-predicate structure like that of English. Y. R. Chao (1968), for example, said that all Chinese clauses have topic-comment structure and there are no exceptions.
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Clause linking in Dulong-Rawang
(2006)
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Randy J. LaPolla
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Comparative constructions in Rawang
(2004)
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Randy J. LaPolla
- Dulong and Rawang are closely related Tibeto-Burman languages spoken just south and east of Tibet.
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Constituent structure of a Tagalog text
(2008)
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Randy J. LaPolla
- This paper is an inductive look at the constituents found in a randomly selected Tagalog text, Bob Ong’s Alamat ng Gubat (Makati City, MM: Visual Print Enterprises, 2004). The analysis is based on the full text, but we will only be able to go through the first few lines of the text here, which we will do one by one, and discuss the structures found in each line of the text in bullet format after the relevant line. At the end of the paper we will bring up some important questions about the structures found in Tagalog based on this text.
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Copula constructions in Rawang
(2007)
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Randy J. LaPolla
- This paper discusses the various uses of the copula in the Rawang language, a Tibeto-Burman language of northern Myanmar, plus other types of copula like-constructions, with data taken mainly from naturally occurring texts.
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Direct and indirect speech in Tagalog
(2005)
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Randy J. LaPolla
Dory Poa
- Tagalog is an Austronesian language of the Philippines. It is the basis for one of the two official languages of the Philippines, Pilipino, and as such potentially spoken by 81 million people, though there are many sub-varieties.
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Evidentiality in Qiang
(2003)
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Randy J. LaPolla
- The Qiang language is spoken by about 70,000 (out of 200,000) Qiang people, plus 50,000 people classified as Tibetan by the Chinese government. Most Qiang speakers live in Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau in the mountainous northwest part of Sichuan Province, China. The Qiang language is a member of the Qiangic branch of the Tibeto-Burman family of the Sino-Tibetan stock. Within Tibeto-Burman, a number oflanguages show evidence of evidential systems, but these systems cannot be reconstructed to any great time depth. The data used in this chapter is from Ranghang Village, Chibusu District, Mao County in Aba Prefecture.
