Adjectival modification in Mandarin Chinese and related issues

Waltraud Paul (1)

1 CRLAO - Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l'Asie Orientale

Against the background of recent typological studies postulating crosslinguistically valid hierarchies for the modifiers within the DP (cf. Scott 1998, 2002a, 2002b; Chao et al. 2001; Laenzlinger 2000), the present article argues that both types of modification available in Mandarin Chinese have to be taken into account: that where the subordinator deintervenes between the adjective and the head noun — ‘A de N’ — and the case of simple juxtaposition of the adjective and the noun ‘A N.’ Extensive evidence is provided against the widespread idea that attributive adjectives in Mandarin Chinese can be analyzed as relative clauses and that ‘A N’ de-less modification structures are compounds (cf. Sproat and Shih 1988, 1991; Duanmu 1998; Simpson 2001). As a consequence, adjectives cannot be conflated with intransitive stative verbs, but have to be recognized as a separate part of speech in Mandarin Chinese.

Mots clés: Mandarin Chinese; adjective ordering restrictions

Domaines: Linguistique

Waltraud Paul. Adjectival modification in Mandarin Chinese and related issues. Linguistics, 2005, 43 (4), pp.757-793. ⟨10.1515/ling.2005.43.4.757⟩. ⟨halshs-01574254⟩