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Article published In: Chinese Language and Discourse
Vol. 7:1 (2016) ► pp.23–65

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The many faces of adverbial margins

 | Department of Asian Studies
Published online: 4 October 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/cld.7.1.02li
This study analyzes adverbial margins as a functional category in Chinese and, through the analysis, elucidates a graded distinction between subordination and coordination. Adverbial margins, which describe circumstances of situations in sentence nuclei, involve a varying of structural devices, including connectives, nominal forms, aspectually marked verbs, negation, and modality adverbs. The margin-nucleus pairs show varied degrees of subordination. This study takes an initial step towards substantiating and quantifying the gradient distinction. A mechanism of five parameters is proposed to rank margin-nucleus pairs in terms of tightness in clause linkage and subordination. The study contributes to the functional analysis of Chinese and the cross-linguistic discussions of the typology of subordination and coordination.
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