The Invertible Construction in Chinese

Yan Cong, Chu Ren Huang, Lian Hee Wee

    Research output: Contribution to conferenceConference paperpeer-review

    Abstract

    This paper argues that the Invertible Construction (IC) in Chinese is a kind of distributive construction. What appears to be an inversion of word order is best understood as the division of the theme NPto be acted upon by a number of agents for an embedded event. This analysis best captures a number of otherwise intractable properties of the IC including the necessarily quantitative interpretation of the NPs and the incompatibility with adverbs of volition.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages206-211
    Number of pages6
    Publication statusPublished - 2015
    Event29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2015 - Shanghai, China
    Duration: 30 Oct 20151 Nov 2015

    Conference

    Conference29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2015
    Country/TerritoryChina
    CityShanghai
    Period30/10/151/11/15

    Scopus Subject Areas

    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Human-Computer Interaction
    • Linguistics and Language

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