Activity: Talk/lecture or presentation › Talk/lecture
Description
A well-known generalization about bare numeral phrases (BNPs) in Mandarin (e.g., san-ge ren 'three people') is that they tend to require the presence of the existential verb you 'have' when in subject position of episodic sentences, but there are some notable exceptions. This talk concentrates on the data in Li (1998) and Tsai (2001) and presents an exhaustivity-based account for the occurrences of subject BNPs, according to which they must be exhaustively interpreted. A wide range of quantificational constructions where Mandarin subject BNPs are licensed will be surveyed (including cumulative, scalar focus, modal, and sufficiency), and it will be argued that exhaustively is the semantic common core of all these (otherwise heterogeneous) constructions. Comparisons of the proposal with previous approaches will also be discussed.