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Article published In: Concentric
Vol. 45:1 (2019) ► pp.24–43

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On maximality in Mandarin possessives

 | Chung Yuan Christian University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 31 May 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/consl.00002.wan
Abstract
The possessive construction in Mandarin is similar to English prenominal possessives except that maximality is presupposed only for cases involving inherently relational nouns. In this paper, I adopt the hypothesized split of argument and modifier genitives proposed by Partee & Borschev (Partee, Barbara Hall, and Vladimir Borschev. 2001. Some puzzles of predicate possessives. Perspectives on Semantic, Pragmatic and Discourse. A Festschrift for Ferenc Kiefer, ed. by István Kenesei and Robert M. Harnish, 91–117. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2003. Genitives, relational nouns, and argument-modifier ambiguity. Modifying Adjuncts, ed. by Ewald Lang, Claudia Maienborn and Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen, 67–112. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and argue that modifier-genitives can occur NP-internally in Mandarin possessives, whose appearance is restricted to cases with non-relational nouns. The discrepancy of the maximality presupposition observed in Mandarin can thus be captured since non-relational nouns can have a split of interpretations between argument and modifier genitives, resulting in a non-maximality reading.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and problems
  • 3.The assumptions
  • 4.The semantic analysis
    • 4.1The semantics of high-possessor possessives
    • 4.2Prenominal relative clauses
    • 4.3Predicate possessives
    • 4.4Comparison with English
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • List of abbreviations
  • Notes
  • References
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