Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China.
Educational Testing Service, Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2019 Jul 18;14(7):e0219896. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0219896. eCollection 2019.
This paper investigates a particular type of non-canonical construction in Mandarin Chinese displaying an apparent semantics-syntax mismatch. We conducted an acceptability judgment experiment on native Mandarin speakers to evaluate whether such sequences could stand out of context as acceptable fragments. Analyses on experimental results revealed that: both semantic and syntactic acceptability of these sequences were significantly lower than those of canonical nominal classifier phrases; whereas if contextualized, the syntactic acceptability of those sequences became similar to that of canonical nominal phrases. This suggests that the non-canonical sequences are grammatically not on the same footing as canonical expressions; and it is the sentential context that makes these sequences appear structurally well-formed. These findings contribute to general discussions on relationship between constituency and grammaticality by demonstrating the gradient nature of grammaticality, and advocate a dynamic perspective in linguistic analysis that looks at a sequence of words in interaction with other elements in a sentence.
本文研究了汉语中一种特殊的非规范结构，这种结构表现出明显的语义-句法不匹配现象。我们对母语为汉语的人进行了可接受性判断实验，以评估这些序列在脱离语境的情况下是否可以作为可接受的片段。对实验结果的分析表明，这些序列的语义和句法可接受性都明显低于规范的名词分类词短语；而如果语境化，这些序列的句法可接受性就会变得与规范的名词短语相似。这表明，非规范序列在语法上与规范表达式并不相同；正是句子语境使这些序列在结构上看起来是完整的。这些发现通过展示语法性的渐变性质，对关于结构和语法性之间关系的一般性讨论做出了贡献，并倡导在语言分析中采用一种动态的观点，即关注与句子中其他元素相互作用的词序列。
