Abstract
This paper investigates a particular type of non-canonical construction in Mandarin Chinese displaying an apparent semantics-syntax mismatch. We conducted an acceptability judgment experiment on native Mandarin speakers to evaluate whether such sequences could stand out of context as acceptable fragments. Analyses on experimental results revealed that: both semantic and syntactic acceptability of these sequences were significantly lower than those of canonical nominal classifier phrases; whereas if contextualized, the syntactic acceptability of those sequences became similar to that of canonical nominal phrases. This suggests that the non-canonical sequences are grammatically not on the same footing as canonical expressions; and it is the sentential context that makes these sequences appear structurally well-formed. These findings contribute to general discussions on relationship between constituency and grammaticality by demonstrating the gradient nature of grammaticality, and advocate a dynamic perspective in linguistic analysis that looks at a sequence of words in interaction with other elements in a sentence.
Highlights
A constituent in syntactic analysis usually refers to a word or a group of words that could function as a single unit within a hierarchical structure
We conducted a psycholinguistic experiment and a theoretical constituency test to analyze whether a particular type of CLPs can stand alone as a canonical phrase
Both the experimental evidence and the constituency test results suggest that the verbal or temporal classifier and the nominal in the verbal or temporal CLPs are not integrated into a proper structural relation, and the [temporal/verbal classifier + N] sequence does not form a phrasal constituent, be it noun phrase or verb phrase
Summary
A constituent in syntactic analysis usually refers to a word or a group of words that could function as a single unit within a hierarchical structure. Constituents as such are largely phrases (sequences of words built around a head lexical item and working as a unit in a sentence) in many languages. Especially generative linguistics, constituency tests (e.g., fronting, clefting, replacement, ellipsis, passivization, omission and coordination) play a crucial role in identifying constituent structures and analyzing issues concerning language structure [1]. It is no surprise that many constituency tests tend to deliver contradictory results
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