Judge-dependence in quality nouns
A semantic analysis of the Mandarin Chinese “you NP” structure
By combining the idea of property concepts and the kernel-based theory of subjectivity, this paper proposes an
analysis of the otherwise mysterious behavior of the Mandarin “you” predicates, where subjectivity/evidentiality and
possessive/attributive readings come and go in an intricate way. The paper presents a phenomenon of Mandarin called possessive
Property Concept predicates, involving a possessive morpheme you “have” and a bare NP. Studying the subjectivity
puzzle in Chinese advances our understanding of information source and information force in the following way. The Chinese fact,
as a separate element, is part of the bigger picture about subjectivity. To explain how the subjectivity predicate as a natural
class connects with evidentiality, this paper provides an approach to probe subjectivity through examining the information source
change, which is derived from removing or adding evidential morpheme(s).
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Previous studies on judge-dependence
- 2.1Diagnostics of taste predicates
- 2.2Non-indexical relativism and other alternatives
- 2.3Key assumptions
- 3.A natural class expressing relative truth
- 3.1Identifying the ssubjective ‘you NP’
- 3.2More about subjectivity, evidentiality, and directness
- 3.3Evidentiality and the ganjue-dao test
- 4.Quality denoting noun
- 4.1Quality noun vs. non-quality noun
- 4.2Quality noun vs. mass noun
- 4.3Expansion to the Chinese data
- 5.Theoretical landscape
- 5.1Connecting possessive property concept with you NP
- 5.2Using kernel to formalize the ‘direct’ proposal
- 6.Proposed analysis
- 6.1Denotations and computations
- 6.2Predictions and complications
- 7.Summary and future studies
- Acknowledgements
- Note
- Abbreviations and gloss conventions used
-
References
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