CITU 2nd Academic Salon
Dr. Zhang Daqiu, Chinese Director of CI at Tallinn University, led a seminar on Functional Category Hypothesis and Chinese Syntax, which focused on the functional heads like BE, DO, BECOME and CAUSE respectively for the syntax of state, activity, achievement / incohative, and accomplishment verbs.
Dr. Zhang Daqiu, Chinese Director of CI at Tallinn University, led a seminar on Functional Category Hypothesis and Chinese Syntax, which focused on the functional heads like BE, DO, BECOME and CAUSE respectively for the syntax of state, activity, achievement / inchoative, and accomplishment verbs.
This talk argues that Chinese language highly observes the principle of economy not only in semantic expressions, but also in syntactic configurations, with quite a couple of particular syntactic performances like adjective phrases, noun phrases functioning as predicates as claimed by many scholars in China. These seemingly unique syntactic performances are argued with no uniqueness from the perspective of universal principle of languages, but rather representations with covert functional heads in light with Functional Category Hypothesis(FCH).
FCH is well justified in English and various other languages, and thus might as well be applicable to Chinese. The talk also illustrated that the controversial view on Topic construction and so called S-V as predicate construction, for which FCH may also help to clarify the dispute. The concluding remarks claim that phonetic representations of covert functional heads are for stylistic or pragmatic purposes.