Lecture | CHiLL series
The Meaning of Mandarin Repetition Adverb chóngxīn ‘again’
- Date
- Wednesday 12 November 2025
- Time
- Serie
- Chinese Linguistics in Leiden (ChiLL)
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.31
Abstract
This research proposes an analysis of the Mandarin repetition adverb chóngxīn ‘again’, which, like English again (Rapp & von Stechow, 1999; Beck 2005), permits either a repetitive reading or a restitutive reading when used with predicates that encode result states, as in (1).
- XiaoMing chóngxīn huídào le Beijing. ‘XiaoMing returned to Beijing again.’
Rep: XiaoMing returned Beijing before. | Res: XiaoMing was in Beijing before.
Predicates that do not encode result states, however, only permit a repetitive reading of chóngxīn. In addition, with these predicates, chóngxīn entails an attitude meaning (AM), as in (2), defined in (3).
- XiaoMing chóngxīn xiě le yìpiān wénzhāng. ‘XiaoMing wrote an article again.’
Rep: XiaoMing wrote an article before. | Res: #
AM: XiaoMing thinks the previous event of writing an article is unsatisfactory.
- AM of chóngxīn: a salient person in the discourse is unsatisfied with the previous event.
As shown in (4), (1) is acceptable in a context which entails the falsity of the AM, while (2) is not, indicating that (2) entails the AM while (1) doesn’t. Even though there exist objective negative facts, as the underlined part in Context 3, if XiaoMing doesn’t have a negative attitude towards it, uttering chóngxīn is also infelicitous.
- Context 1: XiaoMing was in Beijing in 2005 and left there in 2006. He returned to Beijing in 2007 and he was very happy with the life there. This year, after having left Beijing for months, (1). [pure restitutive]
Context 2: XiaoMing wrote an article last month and it was accepted for publication. XiaoMing was happy about it, and yesterday, #(2).
Context 3: XiaoMing wrote an article last month and it was accepted for publication. However, the publisher’s computer broke down and lost all the manuscripts. XiaoMing wasn’t sad about it since he decided not to publish at the last minute. After that, #(2).
The AM is entailed by chóngxīn only when a restitutive reading is not possible, based on which I adopt a lexical approach to the AM and propose that chóngxīn is ambiguous. After testing the projective properties (Tonhauser et al., 2013) of both the repetition meaning and the AM of chóngxīn, I argue that both of them are presuppositions and that while the former is anaphoric (Beck, 2007), the latter is informative (Tonhauser, 2015). I propose the lexical entries below: an AM is entailed by chóngxīn1 but unspecified for chóngxīn2.
- [[chóngxīn1]] = 𝝺e’.𝝺Pv,t.𝝺e. ∂[P(v) =1 & 𝞽(e’) ≪ 𝞽(e)& a salient person 𝜶 in the discourse thinks e’ is unsatisfactory]. P(e).
[[chóngxīn2]] =𝝺e’.𝝺 Pv,t.𝝺e. ∂[P(v) =1 & 𝞽(e’)≪ 𝞽(e)]. P(e).
By contrast, since the Rep-Res ambiguity arises with both chóngxīn, I adopt a structural analysis that different readings are due to various modification scope of chóngxīn in the LF.