EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Section 1 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 17 The field consists of 6 basic morphemes: 安 [an] ‘calm’, 定 [ding] ‘stable’, 静 [jing] ‘motionless, quiet’, 宁 [ning] ‘tranquil’, 平 [ping] ‘even, smooth’, 稳 [wen] ‘steady’, and 10 compounds built of these morphemes. Most of the morphemes and compounds can be reduplicated. Grammatically, the meaning `calm down’ in Chinese is expressed by collocations of the predicatives denoting ‘calm’ with complements of direction denoting moving down, namely, 下 [xia], 下来 [xialai], 下 去 [xiaqu] (cf. ‘calm down’ in English). The paper also studies the predicative 安 [an] ‘calm’ and its relationship to the semantic field of emotions in general by means of analyzing the definitions of emotions given in “ 现代汉语词典 ” (“The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary”). The list of emotions is taken from the dictionary “ 同义词词林 ”, which is built as a thesaurus. The paper claims that calmness is opposed not to emotions in general, but to certain groups of emotions such as distress, rage, shame, anxiety, and fear. It is proved by the fact that 不安 [bu an] and its synonym 不平 [bu ping] are used in the definitions of these emotions only. Therefore, being calm does not mean the absence of emotions. This implies that it is an emotional state and should be included in the system of emotions. The state of being calm easily combines with the state of being glad ( 乐 [le]), cf. 安乐 [anle] ‘carefree’, 安居乐业 [an ju le ye] `live and work in peace and contentment’. Arcodia Giorgio Francesco (University of Milano-Bicocca) Sinitic Relative Clauses: Headedness and Relativisation Strategies Key words: Sinitic, relative clause, relativiser, word order, grammaticalisation In this paper we will discuss relative clause (RC) constructions in the Sinitic language family. Basing on data from a convenience sample of forty Sinitic languages, we will sketch a typology of Sinitic RCs according to two parameters: a. Position of the head. Despite the widely held belief that Chinese has only head-final RCs, head-initial relatives have been reported e.g. for Kaiping (Yue 1995), Hui’an Southern Min (Chen 2008) and Mandarin, and head-internal RCs have been reported for Wenzhou: (1) ŋa33-bo21 ɦo342 na42-ŋ̍ 44 keʔ0 (Hu, Cecchetto & Guasti 2015) grandma draw child REL ‘The child who the grandma draws / the grandma who draws the child’ Moreover, a head-internal analysis has been proposed also for Cantonese object RCs. b. Relativization strategy. Apart from the familiar 的 de-marked relative clause, we will discuss relativisa- tion patterns based on demonstratives, classifiers and other markers. We will higlight the correlations both between the choice of relativiser and other features of the language (as the use of determiners in NPs; see e.g. Liu 2005), and between relativisation strategies and semantic/pragmatic features of the RC construction (e.g. specific vs. non-specific RCs). Selected references: 1. Chan,A. / Matthews, S. / Yip, V. (2011), The acquisition of relative clauses in Cantonese andMandarin, in E. J. Kidd (ed.), TheAcquisition of Relative Clauses: Processing, Typology and Function,Amsterdam-Philadelphia, John Benjamins,197–225. 2. Chen, W. (2008), Relative clauses in Hui’an dialect, in Chan M. K. M. &Kang H. (eds.), Proceedings of the NACCL-20. Columbus (OH): The Ohio State University, 567–582. 3. Hu, S., / Cecchetto, C. / Guasti, M.T. (2015), Production of head-final relative clauses: New data fromWenzhounese. Poster presented at the 41st Incontro di Grammatica Generativa, Perugia, 26–28 February. 4. Liu, D. (2005), 汉语名词短语的句法类型特征 , 《中国语文》 1, 3–15. 5. Yue, A. O.-K. (1995), 广东开平方言的 “ 的 ” 字结构，《中国语文》 4, 289–297