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1	Topics in the Mandarin Lian.dou construction: its syntax and acquisition
	Li, Pengfei. - 2020
	Abstract: This dissertation investigates the Mandarin lian…dou construction (roughly the equivalent of the English even-construction) from two perspectives: its syntax and acquisition. The research questions pursued in this dissertation are: 1) What drives the syntactic movement in the lian…dou construction? 2) How does the even-like interpretation arise in the lian…dou construction? and 3) What constitutes children’s knowledge of the implicatures of the lian…dou construction? With respect to the first question, following (Fanselow & Lenertová, 2011), it is proposed that the movement in the lian…dou construction is driven by an unselective edge feature of CP (Chomsky, 2008) and is subject to the locality constraint of accentuation that bans the movement of a phrase with structural accent across another phrase with the same type of accent. The advantage of this proposal is that it can explain the partial focus movement seen in unusual lian…dou sentences where the VP or the whole clause is the focus. Furthermore, I propose that dou is an adverb above TP. Lian selects an EdgeP. The Edge head has the unselective edge feature that picks and moves a constituent to SpecEdgeP. With respect to the second question, under Y. Xiang’s (2019) analysis, the alternatives for dou can be construed in two ways, either in terms of likelihood or in terms of innocent excludability (Fox, 2007). In the former case, dou becomes a mirative marker (or at least it expresses relative surprise; the prejacent is said to be less likely than some alternative). But Y. Xiang does not provide a method for choosing among these options. The mirativity corresponding to the unselective edge feature, I argue, is what disambiguates dou in favor of its mirative instantiation, forcing the alternatives to be construed in terms of likelihood. As for children’s knowledge of the two meaning components of the lian…dou construction: the existential implication (that alternatives exist) and the scalar implication (that the mentioned alternative is the least likely) (Karttunen & Peters, 1979), the results of an experimental study show that even 6-year-old children were generally not able to compute either of them. It is proposed that children’s failure with the meaning components of lian…dou was due to their limited cognitive resources and the excessive task demands.
	Keyword: Acquisition; Even; Implication; Linguistics; Mandarin Lian.dou; Syntax
	URL: https://hdl.handle.net/2144/39860
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