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publications

Referentiality, Individuation and Incompletive Readings

Published in Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 2020

Recommended citation: Zhang, Anqi. (2020). "Referentiality, Individuation and Incompleteness Reading." Journal of East Asian Linguistics. 29(4):435-468.
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The Architecture of the Perfective Viewpoint Aspect in Mandarin

Published in Chicago Linguistics of Society, 2020

Recommended citation: Luo, Qiongpeng & Zhang, Anqi. (2020). "The Architecture of the Perfective Viewpoint Aspect in Mandarin." Proceedings of Chicago Linguistics Society 56 .

Floating Numeral Phrases and Event Measurement in Guaymi

Published in WCCFL 37, 2021

Recommended citation: Cisneros, Carlos & Anqi, Zhang. (2021). "Floating Numeral Phrases and Event Measurement in Guaymi." Proceedings of the 37th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics .ed. D. K. E. Reisinger and Marianne Huijsmans, 116-126. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
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Mandarin De-adjectival Degree Achievements as Inchoative Statives

Published in Language and Linguistics, 2023

Recommended citation: Zhang, Anqi. (2023). "Mandarin De-adjectival Degree Achievements as Inchoative states." Language and Linguistics.24(1):146-180.
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传信视角下的程度副词省略

Published in 世界汉语教学, 2025

Recommended citation: 张安琪 (2025). "传信视角下的程度副词省略" 世界汉语教学. 39(2)：209-223.
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Transitivity and Non-Scalar Change-of-States in Mandarin

Published in Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 2025

Recommended citation: Zhang, Anqi. (forthcoming). "Transitivity and Non-Scalar Change-of-States in Mandarin." Journal of East Asian Linguistics.

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A Semantic Typology of Completives

Published: March 05, 2024

In Mandarin, it has been claimed that Mandarin lacks inherent bare transitive accomplishment verbs. To entail event culmination, a resultative verbal compound (RVC) construction, such as xiu-hao ‘fix good’, can be used instead of bare verbs. Among these resultative markers, a special subclass consisting of members such as wan ‘finish’, diao ‘drop’, hao ‘good’, cheng ‘succeed’ have been singled out as general completive markers. While in many situations these completive markers can be used more or less synonymously, they nevertheless exhibit subtle differences in their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic distributions. Although these differences have been described quite extensively in the descriptive linguistic literature, they have not been studied quite well in formal semantics.

Emergence of Evaluative Completive hao in Mandarin

Published: March 06, 2025

Completive markers can express speakers’ attitudes in Japanese and Korean (Strauss, 2002; Davis and Gutzmann, 2015). However, crosslinguistic variations and changes of these evaluative completives have not been extensively studied. This paper offers a diachronic study of V-hao ‘good’ in Chinese, a similar evaluative completive expressing a speaker’s positive attitude. We propose that hao ‘good’ started with its evaluative meaning as a subjective adjective, and later acquired aspectual semantics, suggesting variations in paths of multi-dimensional meanings for completives.

Capturing Modal Base Polarity with Mandarin wh-indefinites

Published: April 26, 2025

Mandarin wh-words occur as polarity-sensitive indefinites, which are licensed by epistemic expressions and negation, but not by deontic modals or other downward entailing operators. Previous analyses based on scalar strength reversal do not have an explicit mechanism for accounting for subtle distributional differences between different types of non-veridical environments. We propose Mandarin wh-indefinites have an epistemic uncertainty presupposition that contradicts the semantics of an assert operator (Alonso-Ovalle and Men´endez-Benito, 2011), unless intervened by non-veridical operators. By invoking Hacquard’s (2010), we explain general licensing by epistemic, and not deontic, modals as a requirement that event arguments for presuppositions of wh-indefinites be interpretable only above aspectual markers, consequently compatible with semantic scope below epistemic operators but above deontic operators.

Anqi Zhang