Investigates the distribution of existential polarity wh-phrases (EPWs) in Chinese that behave like negative polarity items, examining the distribution of Chinese EPWs and arguing that using EPWs is felicitous if the local propositions in which they appear do not entail existence of a referent satisfying the EPW description. The paper considers…

Proposes that the bei-construction, a Mandarin Chinese passive construction, is not derived uniformly, but rather, three types of bei-sentences must be recognized. Presents basic facts about bei-construction; shows consistent structural differences between bei-sentences with and without the lexical logical subject, discussing A-dependency and…

Uses a detailed analysis of a single grammatical problem to present the principal commitments and mechanisms of a grammatical theory that assigns a central role to the notion of grammatical construction. The grammatical phenomenon used to introduce construction grammar is the construction that licenses the surprising syntactic and semantic…

Examines parallelisms between surface structure and logical structure and why those parallelisms do not extend farther than they do. If syntactic deep structures are identified with logical structures, an appropriate cyclic principle guarantees that cyclic rules will apply so that large-scale parallelisms exist between surface syntactic structures…