清华大学外文系语言、心理与认知学科群学术报告
报告题目: Main Clause Phenomena of Peripheral Functional Projections in Chinese （汉语左缘结构中的根句现象）
关键词：左缘结构、制图理论、最简方案、句末语气词、根句现象、嵌入式从句
主讲人：Prof. Victor Pan (潘俊楠教授)
报告地点：清华大学文南楼116会议室
报告时间：2018年3月22日，14:00-15:30
Abstract
A general hierarchy that orders functional projections in the periphery of Chinese is: AttP (Speaker’s attitude) > SQP (Special questions) > iForceP (illocutionary force) > OnlyP (Sentential exclusive focus) > S.AspP (sentential aspects) > TP… The hierarchy of these functional projections is determined by the “Subjectivity Scale Constraint” which functions at the syntax-discourse interface. Namely,
(i) The higher a functional projection is, the more directly such a projection is linked to the speaker’s opinion;
(ii) the more directly a functional projection is linked to the speaker’s opinion, the more subjective the interpretation of such a projection becomes;
(iii) the more subjective the interpretation of a functional projection is, the more difficult it is for such a projection to be embedded.
The Subjectivity Scale Constraint that I propose states that the higher a functional projection is, the more difficult it is for such a projection to be embedded. Two different types of embeddabilities are examined. Syntactic embeddability is to check if an element can appear syntactically in an embedded clause. For instance, discourse particles related to the speaker’s attitude can never occur in an embedded clause; therefore, they cannot be embedded syntactically. On the contrary, sentential aspect particles and the exclusive focus particles can appear in an embedded clause; thus, they can be embedded syntactically. Semantic embeddability is to check whether an embedded element has exactly the same interpretation or the same pragmatic function in an embedded clause as in a matrix clause. The embeddability test based on the Main Clause Phenomena (MCF) is an indirect argument in favor of the proposed hierarchy of the peripheral functional projections.
Bio Sketch
Professor Victor Junnan Pan is a Junior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France (法兰西大学学院青年院士), an Associate Professor with tenure in theoretical linguistics at the University Paris 7, habilitated for PhD students supervision, and a research staff member affiliated in Laboratoire de Linguisitique Formelle. He also served as an executive committee member of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL) and of the European Association of Chinese Linguistics (EACL). Specializing in Generative Syntax, Prof. Pan’s research covers Chinese syntax, French syntax, syntax-semantic-discourse interfaces, etc. and the topics he investigated include interrogatives (wh-in-situ, wh-ex-situ), quantification in formal linguistics, information structure (topicalization, focalization), left-periphery, cartography, resumptivity and different types of A'-dependency. Prof. Pan has published journal articles, book chapters and five research monographs both in French and in English. His recent book Resumptivity in Mandarin Chinese: A Minimalist Account (Mouton De Gruyter, 2016) not only gives a thorough description of the distribution of resumptive dependencies in different contexts from a comparative perspective but also offers a theoretical account in the framework of the Minimalist Program, which improves the general understanding of resumptivity crosslinguistically. His forthcoming book The Architecture of Periphery in Chinese: Cartography and Minimalism (Routledge, 2018) provides a new perspective on the study of peripheral functional projections in Chinese.
