作格语言的主语和汉语的主语

Revisiting the notion of subject in ergative languages and Mandarin Chinese

王遥、李景娜(2020)指出汉语与作格语言在形态和句法上有相似性,有一定程度的作格特征,汉语的主语也与作格语言也存在较多共同之处;高明乐、潘晓颖(2020)认为汉语凸显的是话题,主语不易识别,因而可以摒弃主语概念。本文提出一些不同看法,认为作格的本质是语法关系的形式表达方式,汉语没有这些形式标记,不是类型学意义上的(分裂)作格语言,而是一种中性语言,作格性与汉语主语问题并不相涉;主语是一个原型范畴,非典型的主语多为语用现象,语用可以偏离语法,但不能脱离或者取消语法。

This paper revisits the notion of subject in ergative languages and Mandarin Chinese.It claims that ergativity is an alignment strategy of grammatical relations between the verb and the core arguments.Mandarin Chinese is not a(split-)ergative language but a neutral one because no ergative case marking or adpositions are employed.Moreover,it is argued that syntactic ergativity is a subtype of morphological ergativity and plays a minor role in the ergativity analysis because only a few languages are attested and the coordinating motivation is not well-defined.It is also proposed that subject is a prototype and also a universal notion which consists A and S.This work fine-tunes some details in the discussions of subject in Mandarin Chinese(Wang&Li 2020;Gao&Pan 2020).