Fourth year graduate student, Jiaxing Yu, recently presented her work on Mandarin demonstratives at ESSLLI 2023 held at University of Ljubljana (talk) and at Sinn und Bedeutung 28 held at Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) (poster).
Title: Semantics of Mandarin Demonstratives
Abstract: I compare two approaches on demonstratives and show that one of them is better to account for empirical data in Mandarin. Dayal & Jiang (2020) propose that demonstratives carry an anti-uniqueness presupposition itself; the Hidden Argument Theory argues that demonstratives carry an additional restriction. The Mandarin data I focus on involve demonstratives with restrictions that are so specific that anti-uniqueness cannot be met. I show that for this kind of data the HAT is more suited. I further propose that proper names should be added into Ahn (2022)’s R set following Jenks (2018), which also discovers the properties of the restrictions on the demonstratives.