Lecture | CHiLL series
Parametric variations in discontinuous predicates in Sinitic languages
- Date
- Wednesday 7 October 2026
- Time
- Serie
- Chinese Linguistics in Leiden (ChiLL)
- Address
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.30
Abstract
In Sinitic languages, a predicate may appear as a discontinuous string (Chao 1968), like Mandarin’s VO compound in (1) and Cantonese’s monomorphemic loanword in (2), where two syllables are intervened by suffixes/adjuncts. These discontinuous predicates (D-Preds) are remarkable in blurring the syntax-morphology boundary: suffixation indicates wordhood (=a), whereas intervention suggests phrasehood (=b). The majority of current analyses, which are largely based on Mandarin, involve a phrasal VO structure (Huang 1984, Packard 2000, Her 2010, Pan & Ye 2015 i.a.).
(1) D-Preds in Mandarin
a. liuxue-le san-nian
stay.school-PFV 3-year
b. liu-le san-nian xue
stay-PFV 3-year school
(a-b): ‘studied abroad for three years’
(2) D-Preds in Cantonese
a. feilou-zo saam-ci
fail-PFV 3-times
b. fei-zo saam-ci lou
fail-PFV 3-times fail
(a-b): ‘failed three times’
Through a comprehensive study of four Sinitic languages, this study uncovers significant variations in D-Preds despite the surface similarities in (1)-(2). We propose that languages differ in the robustness of two operations: Nominialization and Syllable Subtraction. They give rise to differential properties of D-Preds, which are systemically correlated with independent constructions in the languages. This study implicates that (i) it should not be taken for granted that a given construction is uniform across Sinitic languages, and (ii) some variations are micro-parametric in nature (Tang 1998, 2006, Huang 2015; cf. Kayne 2005).
This study is joint work with Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee, City University of Hong Kong.
Biography
Ka-Fai Yip obtained his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Yale University, and is currently a Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. His research interests lie in theoretical syntax and its interfaces with semantics and prosody, with a focus on Cantonese and other (South)east Asian languages including Mandarin and Vietnamese. He is also interested in language variation measured by corpus, heritage Cantonese (in Toronto and in Saigon), and Cantonese learning and teaching. He has published articles on renowned journals such as Natural Language & Linguistic Theory and Journal of East Asian Linguistics.