Chinese Sentence-Initial Indefinites: What Corpora Reveal

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DC Field	Value
dc.identifier	ECF_chapter_3962
dc.contributor.author	Morbiato Anna
dc.title	Chinese Sentence-Initial Indefinites: What Corpora Reveal
dc.type	Chapter
dc.language.iso	en
dc.description.abstract	While the sentence-initial position in Chinese is generally related to givenness/definiteness, instances of informationally new or indefinite sentence-initial nps may be found in language in use. This paper systematically explores the phenomenon of sentence-initial indefinites (SIIs), their statistical relevance, and the interaction with features typically connected to linear order, such as animacy or locatability. Results of a quantitative and qualitative analysis conducted on three major big-size, generalised corpora show that SIIs in Chinese are not only possible, but also statistically relevant. Animacy and locatability are found to play a key role in increasing SIIs acceptability. Finally, data reveal a new pattern featuring SIIs with proper nouns.
dc.relation.ispartof	Sinica venetiana
dc.publisher	Edizioni Ca’ Foscari - Digital Publishing, Fondazione Università Ca’ Foscari
dc.issued	2020-12-21
dc.dateAccepted	2020-08-18
dc.dateSubmitted	2020-05-11
dc.identifier.uri	http://edizionicafoscari.it/en/edizioni4/libri/978-88-6969-407-3/chinese-sentence-initial-indefinites-what-corpora/
dc.identifier.doi	10.30687/978-88-6969-406-6/002
dc.identifier.issn	2610-9654
dc.identifier.eissn	2610-9042
dc.identifier.isbn	978-88-6969-407-3
dc.identifier.eisbn	978-88-6969-406-6
dc.rights	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
item.fulltext	with fulltext
item.grantfulltext	open
dc.peer-review	yes
dc.subject	Animacy
dc.subject	Animacy
dc.subject	Chinese
dc.subject	Chinese
dc.subject	Corpus study
dc.subject	Corpus study
dc.subject	Information structure
dc.subject	Information structure
dc.subject	Qualitative analysis
dc.subject	Qualitative analysis
dc.subject	Quantitative analysis
dc.subject	Quantitative analysis
dc.subject	Sentence-initial indefinites (SIIs)
dc.subject	Sentence-initial indefinites (SIIs)

Chapter
open access peer reviewed

Chinese Sentence-Initial Indefinites: What Corpora Reveal

Anna Morbiato Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italia; The University of Sydney, Australia

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abstract

While the sentence-initial position in Chinese is generally related to givenness/definiteness, instances of informationally new or indefinite sentence-initial nps may be found in language in use. This paper systematically explores the phenomenon of sentence-initial indefinites (SIIs), their statistical relevance, and the interaction with features typically connected to linear order, such as animacy or locatability. Results of a quantitative and qualitative analysis conducted on three major big-size, generalised corpora show that SIIs in Chinese are not only possible, but also statistically relevant. Animacy and locatability are found to play a key role in increasing SIIs acceptability. Finally, data reveal a new pattern featuring SIIs with proper nouns.

Accepted

Aug. 18, 2020

Submitted

May 11, 2020

Language

ISBN (PRINT)

978-88-6969-407-3

ISBN (EBOOK)

978-88-6969-406-6

Keywords: Quantitative analysis • Information structure • Qualitative analysis • Animacy • Corpus study • Sentence-initial indefinites (SIIs) • Chinese

permalink: http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-406-6/002

Copyright: © 2020 Anna Morbiato. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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