摘要
本文对汉语普通话"们"的语义性质进行了重新界定。普通话只有"表人名词+们"和"人称代词+们"这两种基本形式,没有"专有名词+们"这种说法(不排除二十世纪初部分文学作品和一些北方方言有此用法)。与"复数标记说"和"集体标记说"两大观点不同,本文认为普通话中的"们"不是真正意义上的复数标记,它不参与构造(make)复数个体的过程,只起到标示(mark)复数个体的作用,其本质为"最大化"算子(maximality/iota operator)(Sharvy 1986)。具体而言,(1)由于汉语名词本身有单复数的解读,"们"缀并没有像英语的复数标记-s一样对名词进行"复数化"操作;(2)"们"的语义,与法语中的复数定冠词les类似,起到从名词表示的集合中挑选出最大复数个体的作用,是一个最大化算子。对于人称代词复数形式来说,"们"作用于一个隐性论元,即"会话参与者"(participants)(Harley and Ritter 2002),并从中选取出与语境相关的复数个体,而三身代词的区别在于这些会话参与者是否包括说话者或者听话者作为相应的复数个体的一部分。
This article makes a semantic analysis of the alleged plural marker-men in Mandarin.As a first approximation,the marker-men only follows[+Human]nouns and personal pronouns to express plurality,and the often-discussed examples"proper name+men"are not justified in standard Mandarin(but we do not rule out the possibility that"proper name+men"phrases are sporadically found in literary works written in the beginning of the 20 th century).Two prevailing approaches,namely,the plurality approach(Li 1999)and the collectivity approach(Iljic 1994),will be reviewed respectively.One of the crucial arguments against the plurality approach is that bare nouns in Mandarin have"general numbers",i.e.they are subject to a singular reading or a plural reading(Corbett 2000;Rullmann and You 2006).This implies that it is not necessary for Mandarin nouns to resort to some extra marker,e.g.-men,to derive plural nouns,unless it has other semantic flavors.As far as I understand,the collectivity approach is mainly motivated by the fact that the same plural marker-men is employed for pronouns and common nouns,since,intuitively,plural pronouns express collectivity or group,which is distinct from Landman(2004)’s notion of group.But this account cannot be extended to"common N+men",since no focal member can be picked out in the extension of NP in N-men.Another difficulty with this approach is that N-men can be used in generic sentences,where they are interpreted with a kind reading(Jiang 2017).We propose that the marker-men in Mandarin is not a plural marker but a plural definite article,which is semantically comparable to the French plural article les.Granted that Mandarin bare nouns are ambiguous between singular and plural readings,what-men does is to pick out the largest plural entity from the set of individuals denoted by bare nouns.It is a maximality operator(Sharvy 1986).There is the selectional constraint that-men only follows[+Human]nouns,so is the gender feature associated with definite articles in French.One of the challenges of the
作者
李旭平
LI Xuping(School of Humanities,Zhejiang University,Zhejiang Province 310058)
出处
《当代语言学》
CSSCI
北大核心
2021年第1期1-17,共17页
Contemporary Linguistics
基金
浙江省哲社规划重大课题“语言共性的多视角研究”子项目“汉语比较研究与语言共性和个性的关系”(19YSXK01ZD-3)
浙江省教育厅一般科研项目“汉语复数标记的语义”(Y201941684)
2020年度浙江大学中央基本科研业务费专项资金共同资助
关键词
“们”
复数标记
集体标记
加合
最大化算子
-men
plural marker
collective marker
summing
maximality operator
