Lecture | CHiLL series
Counting events: Syntax and semantics of Chinese verbal classifiers
- Date
- Wednesday 6 November 2024
- Time
- Series
- Chinese Linguistics in Leiden (ChiLL)
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 2.17
Abstract
This talk investigates how counting in the domain of events can be encoded by examining the structure and meaning of Chinese verbal classifiers. While extensive research has focused on counting and measuring expressions in the nominal domain, including Chinese nominal classifiers (Krifka 1989; Cheng & Sybesma 1998,1999; Borer 2005; Huang, Li, & Li 2009; Chierchia 2010; Rothstein 2010; Champollion 2017; a.o.), counting in the verbal domain remains underexplored. What kinds of eventualities can be counted, and what determines whether an eventuality can be expressed as countable? Chinese verbal classifiers, with their observable scope and lexically explicit counting units, provide an ideal case for understanding how event counting works.
Counting in the domain of events exhibits a two-level nesting structure, namely, the event level and the occasion level in Cusic’s (1981) terms. This can be illustrated through the use of stacked time-adverbials in English (Andrews 1983; Ernst 1994; Cinque 1999) and two types of Chinese verbal classifiers (Deng 2013; Donazzan 2013; Zhang 2017). In addition to supporting the distinction between event-level verbal classifiers (e.g., xia) and occasion-level verbal classifiers (e.g., ci), this talk identifies a systematic pattern in how verbal classifiers interact with eventuality types. Specifically, statives like shi (‘be’) are generally incompatible with any verbal classifier, while accomplishments like ying (‘win’) are compatible only with occasion-level verbal classifiers. Activities, in contrast, allow for both types of verbal classifiers. However, when a numeral is included, compatibility differs even within activities. For instance, tui san xia (‘push three times’) is well-formed, whereas deng san xia (‘wait three times’) is not acceptable. Interestingly, replacing xia with ci results in deng san ci which is perfectly fine.
To account for the distribution of the event counting expressions formed with numerals and verbal classifiers, this talk proposes an atom-based analysis of counting (cf. Bach 1986; Krifka 1989; Landman 2006) within the framework of neo-Davidsonian event semantics (Parsons 1990; Carlson 1984; a.o.), which motivates and develops a syntactic representation for event counting expressions.
Biography
Yiyang Guo is a PhD candidate in theoretical and applied linguistics at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Ian Roberts and Theresa Biberauer. She holds a BA and MA in Chinese linguistics from Peking University, China. During the 2023/24 academic year, she was a visiting scholar at Harvard Linguistics. Yiyang’s PhD project investigates quantification in the domain of events with a focus on Mandarin numeral classifiers. Her research interests also include diminutives from a cross-linguistic perspective.