2010 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

On the relations between non-referentiality of personal pronouns and irrealis mood in Chinese

Research Project

Project/Area Number	20720103
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Research Field	Linguistics
Research Institution	The University of Tokyo
Principal Investigator	KOJIMA Miyuki The University of Tokyo, 大学院・総合文化研究科, 学術研究員 (10431777)
Project Period (FY)	2008 – 2010
Keywords	構文理論 / 人称代名詞 / 非指示化 / 非現実ムード / 意志性
Research Abstract	Third person pronouns in Modern Chinese have non-referential functions in certain constructions like extended double object and causative constructions. One crucial characteristic of these third person pronouns is their restriction to such sentence types as imperatives and conditionals, generally characterized as having irrealis force. The present study examines the mechanism in which third person pronouns lose their ability to refer within the framework of Construction Grammar (cf., Croft 2001, Fillmore 1985, Goldberg 1995), which posits constructions, i.e., form-meaning pairings, as basic linguistic units, and argues that there are interesting correlations between the loss of referentiality of third person pronouns and the constraint on mood (i.e., irrealis) observed in sentences they occur in. Further, it is claimed that the loss of referentiality and the mood constraint are an outcome of constructional extension motivated by the meaning of giving or transfer inherent in the double object and causative constructions.