Anqi Zhang

Anqi Zhang

Ph.D. in Linguistics, UChicago

Talks and presentations

Capturing Modal Base Polarity with Mandarin wh-indefinites

April 26, 2025

Poster, WCCFL 43, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA

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.

Emergence of Evaluative Completive hao in Mandarin

March 06, 2025

Talk, Expressivity Workshop, Dgsf 2025, University of Mainz, Germany, Mainz, Germany

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.

A Semantic Typology of Completives

March 05, 2024

Talk, CUHK-UChicago Forum on Comparative Linguistics, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Hong Kong, China

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.