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Why particles are not particular: Sentence‐final particles in Chinese as heads of a split CP
Author(s) -
Paul Waltraud
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
studia linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.187
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-9582
pISSN - 0039-3193
DOI - 10.1111/stul.12020
Subject(s) - adverbial , mandarin chinese , linguistics , subordinator , sentence , adjective , head (geology) , mathematics , computer science , history , philosophy , noun , geology , statistics , lévy process , geomorphology
Biberauer, Newton & Sheehan ([Biberauer, T., 2009]) claim that clause‐final particles are categorially deficient. This move is motivated by the fact that a number of VO languages ‐ among them Mandarin Chinese ‐ display sentence‐final particles ( SFP s), which, when analysed as complementisers, violate the purportedly universal Final‐over‐Final Constraint ( FOFC ). The FOFC excludes structures where a head‐final projection dominates a head‐initial one. In contrast, the present article argues that SFP s in Chinese instantiate C in a three‐layered split CP à la Rizzi ([Rizzi, L., 1997], [Rizzi, L., 2004]) and hence are “visible” for the FOFC . Furthermore, to equate The World Atlas of Language Structures ' ( WALS ) label adverbial subordinator with complementiser as Biberauer et al. ([Biberauer, Theresa, 2008], [Biberauer, T., 2009]) do is shown to be problematic, given that it turns out to be a cover term for different categories. Accordingly, WALS ' results for the distribution of adverbial subordinator cannot be mechanically used as testing ground for the predictions made by the FOFC for the category C.