Abstract
AbstractThe present article demonstrates how the so far unchallenged misanalysis within Chinese linguistics of a few, but central, data points has led to a distorted picture biasing,inter alia, the general typology ofwh-in-situ languages as well as the crosslinguistic study of Quantifier Phrases. This is the case forméi yǒu rén‘not exist person’,hěnshǎo yǒu rén‘rarely exist person’, andzhǐ yǒuDP ‘only exist DP’, which are not nominal projections equivalent of ‘nobody’, ‘only DP’, and ‘few people’ as currently assumed, but existential constructions: ‘there isn't anybody’, ‘there is only DP’, and ‘there are rarely people’. In addition, a subset of speakers has reanalyzedhěnshǎo (yǒu) rénwith a covertyǒu‘exist’ as a QPhěnshǎo rén‘few people’. A corpus study highlights the limited distribution ofhěnshǎo rén‘few people’, which shows that it is not on a par with its antonymhěn duō rén‘many people’.
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