講者：魏廷冀（國立高雄師範大學）
講題：Parameterization of Verb-Echo Answers
時間：2019年12月20日(星期五) 12:30-14:00
地點：人社院 C519室
摘要：This paper argues that verb-echo answers (VEAs) are similarly derived by verb-raising and deletion in Chinese and in some Formosan languages, but their derivations differ in the use of pro-drop, the landing site of verb-raising, and the size of deletion. We propose that VEAs in Chinese involve (i) V-to-v movement (Huang 1991, 1997; Tang 2001, etc.), (ii) VP deletion, and (iii) pro drop. The Formosan languages, belonging to the family of Austronesian languages, spoken in Taiwan, are characterized by their verb-initial structures and agglutination of voice, mood, and tense to the verb stem. In the literature, there is only one language, Puyuma, which has been marked as a language not employing verb-echo answers (Holmberg 2016: 67-71). However, after careful scrutiny, we find that the Formosan languages of our concern can felicitously employ verb-echo answers. We conclude that the typology of the VEAs in Chinese and Formosan languages is significant in strengthening the fact that different languages use different strategies to derive verb-echo answers. Chinese employs pro-drop, V-to-v raising, and VP deletion, whereas the Formosan languages employ V-to-C raising and VoiceP deletion but some variations exist among them. Hopefully, the scenario could explain why languages such as English do not employ verb-echo answers but instead employ unmarked answer particles.