The origin of the adjectival and adverbial "mulaolao" in Wu Chinese Huayun Wang,  Jianguo Xiong and  Cenhong Luo ABSTRACT: The word mulaolao (木佬佬) in Wu Chinese first appeared in written documents published during the period of the former Republic of China. It originated in Hangzhou dialect and spread to other regions such as Ningbo, Taizhou, Jinhua, and Shanghai. In Hangzhou dialect, mulaolao serves both adjectival and adverbial purposes, and it is believed to have derived from the expressive adjective manlaolao (蛮老老). In manlaolao, the suffix -laolao (老老) intensifies the degree of a state or property and is written as “佬佬” due to its uncertain etymology. The

Historical phonological explanation of the mutual connection between the *et and *it rhyme groups: a study on the phonetic Tiangang Bian ABSTRACT: The interaction between the *et and *it rhyme groups, originally distinct rhyme groups, later being able to cross boundaries, is a result and reflection of historical phonetic changes. The germination of their mutual connection can be traced back to the Western Han period but became significant during the Eastern Han, primarily concentrated in the Division III and IV rhyme categories. The mutual connection of the two rhyme groups in the entering-tone(入声) of the Division IV(四等韵) signifies the merger of the *eet>eet(月2屑) and *iit>ᵉiit>eet(质屑) subgroups,

From analogies to negativity: Pragmatic functions and stance expression of subjective counterfactual Ruguo sentence Zengwen Song  and  Xiaoli Wan ABSTRACT: The “Ruguo(如果)” sentence refers to a conditional complex sentence connected by the hypothetical association word “Ruguo(如果)”. The counterfactual “Ruguo(如果)” sentence includes subjective and objective counterfactual sentence. The judgment of subjective counterfactuality depends on semantic recognition and logical derivation. According to the objective truth and falsehood of the previous and last clause, we can divide the subjective counterfactual “Ruguo(如果)” sentence into 4 categories: A true B false, A true B true or false, A true or false B true, A true or false B false. The pragmatic

The resumptive of the Cantonese dummy keoi5 revisited Jackie Yan-Ki Lai,  Lawrence Yam-Leung Cheung  and  Yenan Sun ABSTRACT：This article compares the resumptive and expletive views on an understudied use of the Cantonese pronoun keoi5. We demonstrate that the resumptive view as recently proposed in Yip and Ahenkorah (2022) raises a number of complications, and the so-called dummy keoi5 is better analyzed as a non-subject expletive, in line with traditional descriptions in Matthews and Yip (1994/2011).

A prosodic and perceptional study on the Chinese interrogative pronoun “shen me” when indicating inquiry, free reference and negation Ping Wang, Xiaowen Wang ABSTRACT: This paper makes a comprehensive investigation and comparison of the prosodic and perceptual performance of the interrogative pronoun “shen me” when indicating question, free reference and negation. The results show that the prosodic performance of the sentence using “shen me” to indicate a question is similar to the prosody of an interrogative sentence; the sentence using “shen me” to indicate free reference has the intonation of a declarative sentence with the focus stress on “dou”; and the sentence using “shen me” to

A sentence-medial clause-typing intoneme in Mandarin A-NOT-A questions Chi Wang ABSTRACT: A sentence-medial intoneme is argued to be responsible for typing Mandarin A-NOT-A questions. In narrow syntax, it is merged higher than deontic modals and lower than Tense; after spell-out, it is realized phonetically as a high-low intonation starting from the left edge of the A-NOT-A predicate. This proposal is supported by a sentence-medial segmental particle in Chinese dialects, which further corroborates the Intonation-Particle Hypothesis by showing that typing particles in non-sentence-final positions are also variants of intonations. Besides, the Mandarin nuclear stress rule derives two prosodic features of A-NOT-A questions: No intonational breaks within the

On the distribution and origin of sortal classifiers in Altaic languages Shen-An Chen, Marc Allassonière-Tang, Yung-Ping Liang and One-Soon Her ABSTRACT: The grammatical feature of sortal classifiers, common in East and Southeast Asian languages, is also found in 15 of the 65 Altaic languages we have examined, though the classifiers are far fewer and used optionally. These observations suggest that the Altaic classifier systems are not indigenous. Based on the Single Origin Hypothesis that Chinese is the only language with an indigenous classifier system in Eurasia, we propose that the rise of classifiers in Altaic is due to the influence of neighboring classifier languages. Having first confirmed

Grammaticalized uses of the postverbal locative prepositional phrase in Lianhua Gan Xiaojuan Hu ABSTRACT: The postverbal locative prepositional phrase “Prep+DemLoc” of Lianhua Gan Chinese has been grammaticalized as a postverbal durative marker and a sentence-final mood particle. This study examines the syntactic and semantic properties as well as the grammaticalization of these two uses. The postverbal durative “Prep+DemLoc” is attached to some resultative verb compounds with phase complements that have the semantic features of [+dynamic], [–durative], and [+telic], and expresses the durativity of the resultant states expressed by these RVCs. It forms a contrastive distribution with the perfective marker li. The sentence-final “Prep+DemLoc” fits with the

Shì as a complementizer Zhaole Yang ABSTRACT: In this article, it is argued that a purely functional and semantically bleached shì in Mandarin could in many contexts be best analyzed as a complementizer. As such, it is comparable to English that and functions as an (optional) introducer of the clausal arguments. Our survey shows that the morpheme shì as a complementizer occurs after quite a number of clause introducing operators, for instance, epistemic modals, clausal adverbs, clausal conjunctions, and verbs taking clausal objects like psych verbs and speech-act verbs. Like in some other languages, e.g., the West African language Twi and Dutch, the complementizer can merge

Tense and lax vowels in the Lahu dialect of Yunshan: A laboratory phonological study Yan Liu, Yichen Wei, Yongxian Luo ABSTRACT: A controversy exists regarding whether there are tense-lax vowels in Lahu and whether tense-lax phonation should be accorded phonological status, an issue that is closely related to the physiological movement of the larynx. This study presents an experimental analysis of the acoustic features of the Lahu dialect of Yunshan, using electroglottography to collect acoustic and physiological data and employing VoiceSauce and Eggworks to extract glottal features to explore laryngeal mode of motion. The study demonstrates a distinct tense-lax phonation contrast in Yunshan Lahu, which is