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From Minimal Contrast to Meaning ConstructSemantic Convergence of ALL and ONLY to tɕin in Chengdu Chinese

From Minimal Contrast to Meaning Construct: Semantic Convergence of ALL and ONLY to tɕin in... [The adverbial uses of ALL and ONLY can converge to one and the same visual property word 净 tɕin ‘clean’ in Chengdu Chinese. These two apparently opposite meanings find their common source as “homogeneity”, which may hail from their literal “clean” and “pure” meanings. Crucially, in order for semantic “homogeneity” to apply, plurality is required, be it plurality of a given nominal set or plurality of a set formed by multiple events. The former one, being homogeneous across items, leads to the ALL meaning, whereas the latter one, being homogeneous across time, gives rise to the ONLY sense. As for their application, the ALL operator takes a right-to-left directionality and applies to the plural nominal phrase(s) left to tɕin, while the ONLY operator adopts the left-to-right direction to apply to a constituent within predicate, e.g., the verb, the object, the time adverbial or the location adverbial, depending on contexts. It is with regard to plurality and homogeneity/exhaustivity that the meanings of ALL and ONLY converge to one single item tɕin. Moreover, we find that sensory words in Chengdu Chinese and Cantonese, compared to those in Mandarin, are more likely to serve as adverbials.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

From Minimal Contrast to Meaning ConstructSemantic Convergence of ALL and ONLY to tɕin in Chengdu Chinese

Part of the Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics Book Series (volume 9)
Editors: Su, Qi; Zhan, Weidong
Xiong, Jiajuan; Huang, Chu-Ren
From Minimal Contrast to Meaning Construct — Sep 26, 2019
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References (7)

Publisher
Springer Nature Singapore
Copyright
© Peking University Press 2020
ISBN
978-981-32-9239-0
Pages
135 –145
DOI
10.1007/978-981-32-9240-6_10
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[The adverbial uses of ALL and ONLY can converge to one and the same visual property word 净 tɕin ‘clean’ in Chengdu Chinese. These two apparently opposite meanings find their common source as “homogeneity”, which may hail from their literal “clean” and “pure” meanings. Crucially, in order for semantic “homogeneity” to apply, plurality is required, be it plurality of a given nominal set or plurality of a set formed by multiple events. The former one, being homogeneous across items, leads to the ALL meaning, whereas the latter one, being homogeneous across time, gives rise to the ONLY sense. As for their application, the ALL operator takes a right-to-left directionality and applies to the plural nominal phrase(s) left to tɕin, while the ONLY operator adopts the left-to-right direction to apply to a constituent within predicate, e.g., the verb, the object, the time adverbial or the location adverbial, depending on contexts. It is with regard to plurality and homogeneity/exhaustivity that the meanings of ALL and ONLY converge to one single item tɕin. Moreover, we find that sensory words in Chengdu Chinese and Cantonese, compared to those in Mandarin, are more likely to serve as adverbials.]

Published: Sep 26, 2019

Keywords: Semantic convergence; ALL; ONLY; Plurality; tɕin; Chengdu Chinese

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