Prosody and formation of Modern Chinese parenthetical CTMP ni xiang ‘you think’: A conjoining pathway account

ABSTRACT

The Modern Chinese parenthetical clause-taking mental predicate (CTMP) ni xiang (as in Ni xiang yinian huafei duoshao qian a? ‘You think (about it), how much money will it cost each year?’) is used to urge the hearer to give attention to the content of the clause with which it combines. It is argued that its formation does not follow a commonly accepted matrix clause pathway, in which a parenthetical CTMP develops from a corresponding matrix clause structure, because examples of parenthetical CTMP ni xiang appear more than 150 years earlier than examples of matrix clause ni xiang in Early Modern Chinese. It is hypothesized instead that a conjoining pathway leading from a prosodically separated CTMP ni xiang to a prosodically unseparated CTMP ni xiang may be adopted to account for the formation of parenthetical CTMP ni xiang and its various contextual properties.

KEYWORDS:

• Ni xiang
• parenthetical
• clause-taking mental predicate
• matrix clause pathway
• conjoining pathway

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Haiping Long is a professor at the School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University. His research interests lie in grammaticalization, linguistic typology, historical linguistics and discourse grammar.

Bernd Heine is Emeritus Professor at the Institut für Afrikanistik, University of Cologne. He has published about 40 books and more than 150 journal articles, and has held visiting professorships in Europe, Eastern Asia (Japan, Korea, China), Australia, Africa (Kenya, South Africa), North America (University of New Mexico, Dartmouth College) and South America (Brazil).

Francesco-Alessio Ursini is a professor at the Central China Normal University, School of Chinese Language and Literature. His research focuses on spatial case markers and discourse markers, across different frameworks and languages.

Notes

1 Compare, however, with Aijmer (1997, pp. 8–10) and Brinton (2008, pp. 13–14, 2017, pp. 20–21) for extensive argumentation against treating deletion of that as a defining feature of the parenthetical CTMP I think.

2 Some linguists, including Kärkkäinen (2003) and Palander-Collin (1999), construe the change as an instance of pragmaticalization. Others, including Aijmer & Simon-Vandenbergen (2003, p. 1133) and Brinton (2008, pp. 36–37, 2017, pp. 164–165), argue that the parenthetical CTMP I think does not exhibit internal fixation like other pragmaticalized structures, and thus the change should not be construed as an instance of pragmaticalization (see van Bogaert, 2011, p. 316 for a summary of the discussion).

3 Text examples in this paper have four lines and use standard glossing abbreviations, as per the Lipzig Glossing Rules (www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php). The first line contains the text in Chinese writing; the second provides a corresponding pinyin transcription, the third interlinear glosses and the fourth an idiomatic English translation. Thus, while the comma in (8b) between I thought and the following clause, will he refuse to help me?, would not occur in a literal translation, we follow standard linguistic practice and give idiomatic English translations of all parenthetical CTMPs discussed in this paper. The grammatical abbreviations used in glossing are as follows: ACC: accusative marker; ADV: adverbial phrase marker; CLS: classifier; COP: copula; CSR: current-status related marker; FP: sentence-final particle; NEG: negation; NOMZ: nominalizer; PFV: perfective aspect marker; POSS: possessive marker; PRG: progressive aspect marker; Q: question particle; REL: relativizer

4 http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/

5 In (9), as in all examples of X1 discussed in this paper, the question particle a has scope over the clause (here yinian huafei duoshao qian ‘how much money does it cost every year’), not over X1.

6 See Hooper (1975, p. 111) and van Bogaert (2011, p. 299) for similar discussions of the transparency of the English parenthetical disjunct I think to a factive sentence adverb.

7 See Aijmer (1972), Huddleston & Pullum (2002, p. 893), Quirk et al. (1985, p. 811) and van Bogaert (2011, p. 298) for similar discussions of the transparency of the English parenthetical disjunct I think to a tag question.

8 Following Sun (2006, pp. 15–20), Early Modern Chinese is defined as the common language used in China from 960 CE to 1900 CE.

9 We thank an anonymous reviewer for this observation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China under [grant number 20BYY159].