Zhiguo Xie, assistant professor in Chinese, recently had a paper, entitled “Focus, (non-)exhaustivity, and intervention effects in wh-in-situ argument questions,” accepted for publication in The Linguistic Review, a premier journal in general linguistics. The paper demonstrates that exhaustive focus phrases, in contrast to non-exhaustive ones, trigger intervention effects for wh-in-situ argument questions.
In addition, Xie delivered three conference talks over summer 2013. The first talk was given at the 20th annual meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association, held May 17-19 at the University of Texas at Arlington. In the talk, he discussed an idiosyncratic morphological sensitivity of the Acehnese verb for “know” to what its complement expresses. The second talk was given at the 21st annual meeting of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics, from June 7 to 9 in Taipei, Taiwan. By focusing on the degree use of the possessive verb yǒu in Mandarin Chinese, the talk provided a unified analysis of various uses of the verb. After returning from Taiwan, Xie travelled to the University of Michigan June 21-23, to attend the 25th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics. At the conference, he presented a talk entitled “The yú-comparative construction in Chinese: Case assignment and evaluativity.”