L’étude de la grammaire chinoise joue un rôle important dans la littérature concernant la linguistique formelle et la typologie. Cette journée sera consacrée à l’étude des phénomènes syntaxiques et sémantiques dans les phrases subordonnées du chinois mandarin.
Conférencière invitée : Hongyuan SUN (Université Picardie Jules Verne, CERCLL UR 4283 - Délégation au LLING UMR 6310/CNRS)
Temporal anchoring in Mandarin embedded clauses
Abstract
This talk investigates constraints on the time reference of embedded clauses in Mandarin, a language with no overt grammatical tense, in comparison with English, a tensed language. We show that while English past-tensed embedded clauses disallow later-than-matrix readings in intensional contexts on a de dicto construal, Mandarin relative clauses with bare predicates yield temporally free readings across the board. We argue that the contrast between the temporal interpretations of bare embedded clauses in Mandarin vs. past-tensed embedded clauses in English is not due to a putative contrast between ‘tenseless’ languages (as Mandarin is traditionally assumed to be) and ‘tensed’ languages such as English. Mandarin is indeed not tenseless, but rather has a covert Non-Future tense, restricting the reference time of bare sentences to non-future times. Moreover, Mandarin superficially tenseless embedded clauses with overt—be it perfect, perfective, durative/progressive—aspectual marking do not allow later-than-matrix readings on a de dicto construal, just like tensed embedded clauses in English. We conclude that the freedom of interpretation of bare embedded clauses in Mandarin cannot be imputed to null semantically underspecified tense, but rather to null semantically underspecified aspect. Our analysis provides, to our knowledge, the first arguments for Non-Future tense in embedded contexts.
