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Article In: International Journal of Chinese Linguistics: Online-First Articles

Family is (just) family

Emphatic exclusion and equative tautologies in Mandarin

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Abstract
Equative tautologies in English such as War is war have received considerable attention in the literature, but how the meaning of equative tautologies is derived has remained a research topic. This paper examines the Mandarin equative tautology X jiushi X, and proposes that jiushi is comparable to English just in being a special type of exclusive operator that operates on granularity-based alternative. X jiushi X can be construed as informative, despite its tautological form, because jiushi rules out assertable alternatives that are finer-grained than its prejacent. Other uses of jiushi as a non-canonical exclusive (emphatic, unelaboratory, unexplanatory, and ineffability) and the information structure of the other equative tautology X shi X are also discussed. Through a more restrictive account of alternative exclusion, the proposal fills the gap in the connection between the interpretation of equative tautologies and the nature of the alternatives involved in the derivation of tautological meaning.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.What do equative tautologies exclude: Two previous accounts
    • 2.1Ward & Hirschberg (1991)
    • 2.2Meibauer (2008)
    • 2.3X jiushi X as an equative tautology in Mandarin
  • 3.Mandarin jiushi and emphatic exclusion
    • 3.1Varieties of jiushi and just
    • 3.2Emphatic exclusion and granularity-based alternatives
    • 3.3Jiushi as an emphatic exclusive: A unification
    • 3.4Jiushi and the semantics of equative tautologies
  • 4.Another form of equative tautology: X shi X
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
References (34)
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