The Invertible Construction in Chinese

Yan Cong, Chu Ren Huang, Lian Hee WEE

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-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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