Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Chinese Ergative-Like Construction: Sentences Like "Wangmian Si-Le Fuqin

Chinese Ergative-Like Construction: Sentences Like "Wangmian Si-Le Fuqin

Wang, Tingting
Liu, Tanzhou
Liu, Tanzhou

Hardcover

Series: New Advances in Chinese Grammar, Book 1

Foreign Language GeneralLinguistics

ISBN10: 9819774853
ISBN13: 9789819774852
Publisher: Springer
Published: Oct 31 2025
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.99
Height: 0.50 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Studies on ergativity have provided valuable insights into understanding Chinese, but as research deepens, scholars have discovered areas where ergative theory is difficult to apply to Chinese. This book focuses on Chinese ergative-like sentences, exploring their distinctions from typical ergative structures and evaluating whether they truly fit the ergative classification. The authors focus on the following questions: 1) Why and how has the Wangmian sentence, a simple six-character sentence in Chinese, roughly equivalent to Wangmian's father died in English, sparked long-lasting, intense discussions in Chinese linguistics since the 1950s? 2) Is there a derivational relationship between the Wangmian sentence and other similar sentence structures? 3) How is the concept of ergativity applied to Chinese langauge, esp. in the generation of the Wangmian sentence, and what is its effect? 4) Are die, considered a Chinese ergative verb like open in English, and unergative verbs like laugh and cry truly distinct categories? 5) What valuable insights can we gain from examining the Wangmian sentence from a cognitive perspective? 6) How can we better understand the complexities between the diachronic evolution and synchronic analysis of the Wangmian sentence? Finally, the author compare the explanatory power of constructions and movements-two representative methods of synthetic and analytic approaches-discussing which better reveals the essence of Chinese grammar.

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