※ 國立清華大學語言所101學年度第二學期專題演講七※

演講者： Linda Badan (Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Exchange, CRLAO-CNRS/EHESS-INALCO, Paris)

演講題目：Exclamatives in Mandarin Chinese
時間：2013 年 4 月 17 日(星期三) 中午 12 時 30 分
地點： 清大人社院 B305 室


講題摘要：
This talk deals with sentential exclamatives in Mandarin and has two main objectives. The first is the application of the exclamativity tests proposed in the literature to identify what are the “true” sentential exclamatives in Mandarin. The second goal is to find the necessary components of sentential exclamatives in Mandarin, so as to open a new perspective on the research on exclamatives in general.
My starting point is Zanuttini and Portner’s (2000, 2003) proposal (henceforth Z&P). I agree with Z&P that exclamatives are a product of interaction of different components and not simply of an exclamative operator in the CP area. Z&P argue that two fundamental syntactic components that identify a clause as exclamative are a factive operator and a wh-operator. They state that the force of exclamatives, which they identify with an operation called widening, is derived, indirectly, on the basis of semantic properties. Widening is connected to the surprise reading that generally is regarded as always implied by exclamatives.
First, I apply Z&P’s tests to Mandarin exclamatives, showing that Mandarin has two distinct types of exclamatives. Crucially, I will show that not all the exclamatives have to express surprise. In Mandarin, in fact, only one type of exclamative does express surprise, whereas the other type does not. This leads us to argue that widening, which is only connected to the surprise effect, it is neither a necessary ingredient of exclamatives, nor necessarily related to sentential force, contra Z&P.
I propose also that the wh-operator is not a necessary component of exclamatives, but a crucial role is played by focus. I conclude the paper arguing that scalarity and the speaker’s point of view are overtly spelled out in Mandarin.