Lecture | CHiLL series
Modal phrase reduplication in Xiangzhou Mandarin
- Date
- Wednesday 11 March 2026
- Time
- Serie
- Chinese Linguistics in Leiden (ChiLL)
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 2.24
Abstract
In Xiangzhou 象州 Mandarin (a Southwestern Mandarin dialect spoken in central Guangxi), a phrase introduced by 想 siaŋ (lit. ‘want’), such as siaŋ xia y ‘be about to rain’ in (1), can undergo reduplication. Notably, this kind of phrasal reduplication is not found in Standard Mandarin.
(1) 天 想 下 雨 想 下 雨 的。
t‘en siaŋ hia y siaŋ hia y ti.
sky want fall rain want fall rain PRT
‘It seems to me that it’s about to rain.’
While siaŋ is typically used as a verb expressing the speaker’s desire, in sentences like (1) it conveys prospective meaning, indicating imminent futurity, so it can be translated as to be about to or to be on the point of (Comrie 1976).
In this talk, I investigate the properties of siaŋ and the reduplication of phrases that it introduces. First, I provide evidence that siaŋ is a modal; its syntactic behavior shows that it is neither a verb (contra Lin 2011) nor an adverb (contra Huang 2022). I then show that siaŋ displays the properties of both epistemic and root modals, based on its selectional restrictions and scopal interaction with the sentence final particle 了 lə (marking change of state). Finally, I locate siaŋ between TP and VP according to its interaction with the interpretations of 恁子 nəntsɿ ‘how’.
As for the reduplicative construction, I observe that it behaves identically to adjectival reduplication. Therefore, I propose that the syntactic analysis of adjectival reduplication (Zhang 2015; Xiong 2017) can be extended to ModalP reduplication. Since ModalP itself is not an adjective, I adopt assumptions in Distributed Morphology (Sato 2010; Harley 2011) in tandem with the Renumeration operation (Johnson 2003) to turn the ModalP into a Root, thus enabling it to undergo the same derivation process as adjectival reduplication.