Essays on Mongolian Syntax

Author： Hideki Maki　Liana Bao　Megumi Hasebe ISBN： 978-4-7589-2217-3 First published： 2015 / 10 / 27 Price (in Japan only)： 5,200 yen (Tax Not Included) (200 pages)

Summary

This book is a collection of articles on a variety of syntactic phenomena in Modern Inner Mongolian (Mongolian, hereafter). The main purpose of this book is to collect what we have discovered about Mongolian syntax into one document, so that linguistically significant phenomena from one of the Altaic languages that have not been investigated in detail can be easily accessed by future generations.
This book contains 12 articles, dealing with the distribution of genitive and accusative subjects, properties of possessive and reflexive pronouns, scope interactions with negation, quantifier interactions, properties of focused genitive subjects, structural properties of nominals, and properties of wh-phrases in situ in Mongolian. They are arranged in chronological order in line with our investigation of various topics in Mongolian syntax. The data in each article present linguistically intriguing phenomena, so one can start with any one of the articles in which s/he is interested. It will soon become clear that the articles raise more issues than they solve, which indicates that this book will be a useful reference for interested readers.
Chapter 1 investigates the nominative/genitive alternation in Mongolian. Chapter 2 examines the distribution of genitive subjects in gapless prenominal sentential modifiers. Chapter 3 investigates whether "deep genitive subjects" are really possible in Mongolian based on statistical analysis using the Visual Analogue Scaling (VAS) evaluation method. Chapter 4 examines three case alternation mysteries in Mongolian, and investigates the mechanisms behind them. Chapter 5 examines the distribution and the properties of possessive pronouns in Mongolian. Chapter 6 investigates the distribution of the reflexive pronoun iyan.iyen/ban.ben when it appears with öber 'self.' Chapter 7 investigates the properties of the negation markers in Mongolian. Chapter 8 investigates quantifier interactions in Mongolian. Chapter 9 examines examples with a focused genitive subject in Japanese and Mongolian. Chapter 10 investigates Japanese and Mongolian nominals in terms of Watanabe's (2006) nominal system. Chapter 11 examines the distribution of accusative subjects in Mongolian, and claims that C is actually an abstract accusative Case licensor in this language. Finally, Chapter 12 examines the properties of wh-phrases in situ in Mongolian.

Hideki Maki is an associate professor of linguistics in the Faculty of Regional Studies at Gifu University.

Lina Bao is a foreign researcher in the Faculty of Regional Studies at Gifu University.

Megumi Hasebe is a part-time lecturer of English in the School of General Education at Shinshu University.

Contents

see contents