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16 - Acceptability and Truth-Value Judgment Studies in East Asian Languages

from Part III - Experimental Studies of Specific Populations and Language Families

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2021

By
Shin Fukuda
Edited by
Grant Goodall
Grant Goodall
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Summary

Since the early development of modern syntactic theory, empirical data from three major East Asian languages, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, have often challenged empirical generalizations and theoretical proposals based on data from the better-studied Indo-European languages, especially English. Experimental syntax also began with studies of phenomena in English and other major Indo-European languages. More recently, however, a growing number of experimental syntactic studies have focused on East Asian languages, especially in the past decade. This chapter highlights three phenomena explored in the rapidly growing body of experimental syntactic research with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean: (i) split intransitivity, (ii) quantifier scope, and (iii) wh-in-situ. The goal of the chapter is to show that, while the literature on East Asian experimental syntax is still at an early stage, it has already accumulated interesting experimental data on syntactic phenomena with important theoretical implications.

Keywords

East Asian languagesChineseJapaneseKoreansplit intransitivityquantifier scopewh-in-situ; acceptability judgmenttruth-value judgment
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax , pp. 421 - 447
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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