Wei-Tien Dylan Tsai
List of John Benjamins publications in which Wei-Tien Dylan Tsai is involved.
Journal
ISSN 2213-8706 | E‑ISSN 2213‑8714
2026 On the inner-outer dichotomy of A-not-A questions: A minimalist-cartographic account New Insights into Theoretical Syntax from Asian Languages: Studies in honor of C.-T. James Huang, Simpson, Andrew (ed.), pp. 262–280 | Chapter
In this article, a fine-grained cartographic analysis of Mandarin A-not-A questions is proposed to account for their interactions with various functional elements along the clausal spine: Inner A-not-A questions are sensitive to certain locality effects in Minimalist terms, whereas outer A-not-A… read more
2025 A guide to construct non-canonical wh -questions: A cross-linguistic perspective The Grammar of Canonical and Non-canonical Wh-constructions, Huang, C.-T. James (ed.), pp. 179–202 | Article
This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of non-canonical wh-questions from a cross-linguistic perspective. This study claims that they are encoded through the interaction of various functional elements, prosodic constraints and pragmatic construals. Our investigation reveals that they… read more
2022 On the syntax of mirativity: Evidence from Mandarin Chinese New Explorations in Chinese Theoretical Syntax: Studies in honor of Yen-Hui Audrey Li, Simpson, Andrew (ed.), pp. 431–444 | Chapter
This chapter proposes a unified analysis of Mandarin miratives in terms of their syntax and pragmatics. We examine the rather curious behavior of sentential adverbs such as yuanlai ‘turn out’ and zenme ‘how come’ in conjunction with the sentence final particle a. Specifically, the construals in… read more
2021 Chapter 11. Attitudinal applicative in action Current Issues in Syntactic Cartography: A crosslinguistic perspective, Si, Fuzhen and Luigi Rizzi (eds.), pp. 243–260 | Chapter
In this study, we have investigated a rather peculiar attitudinal construal of an applicative pronoun in Taiwan Southern Min (TSM), which may well advance our understanding of the split affectivity in Chinese dialects (cf. Tsai 2017), as exemplified below: (1) Guá beh lim hōo i kàu-khuì!… read more
2020 A comparative study of how and why in Taiwan Southern Min and Mandarin Chinese Language and Linguistics 21:2, pp. 254–284 | Article
From looking into the same and different properties of how and why between Taiwan Southern Min and Mandarin Chinese, this paper aims to explain the post-verbal how construction with negative speaker attitude. Based on our observations and findings of the specific usages of sī and leh, we propose… read more
2019 Chapter 5. Causality, comitativity, contrastivity, and selfhood: A view from the left periphery and the v P periphery Interfaces in Grammar, Hu, Jianhua and Haihua Pan (eds.), pp. 101–132 | Chapter
When people talk about reflexives, they often think of two arguments in an anaphoric or coargumental relationship. This paper sets out to show that reflexive adverbials also participate in such kind of relationship, but with a far greater range of interpretative possibilities closely associated… read more
2003 Two types of wh-adverbials: A typological study of how and why in Tsou Linguistic Variation Yearbook 2003, Pica, Pierre (ed.), pp. 213–236 | Article
This paper presents cross-linguistic arguments for distinguishing between two types of wh-adverbials: causal how, causal why, and epistemic why pattern together in taking an IP scope, functioning as operators, whereas method how, manner how, and purpose why pattern together in taking a VP scope,… read more