Corrective markers 'bing' and 'you' in Mandarin Chinese

This paper argues that there are two types of corrective words across languages, and both types are attested in Mandarin Chinese. One type (e.g. Mandarin you) manages the Common Ground, as Frana and Rawlins (2019) and Bhatt and Homer (2022) have claimed for Italian mica and Hindi thoṛi:, but there is another type that had not been noticed before (e.g. Mandarin bing)–they mark contrast to a salient expectation. While bing and you have similar syntactic distribution, they have subtle differences in meaning: the use of you implies the speaker’s impatience with the hearer, but bing does not have this inference. I argue that bing and you are located between C and T, and have presuppositions (or conventional implicatures): bing not p presupposes that there is a salient proposition that ¬p contrasts with, while you not p presupposes that the speaker believes that ¬p was already in the Common Ground.

Publication Details

Journal
Open Journal Systems (Global Science & Technology Forum)
Published
2025-09-18
DOI
https://doi.org/10.18148/sub/2024.v29.1306
Primary Topic
Geochemistry and Geologic Mapping
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

Corrective markers 'bing' and 'you' in Mandarin Chinese

Open Journal Systems (Global Science & Technology Forum)
Geochemistry and Geologic Mapping
article

Corrective markers 'bing' and 'you' in Mandarin Chinese

article en

Abstract

This paper argues that there are two types of corrective words across languages, and both types are attested in Mandarin Chinese. One type (e.g. Mandarin you) manages the Common Ground, as Frana and Rawlins (2019) and Bhatt and Homer (2022) have claimed for Italian mica and Hindi thoṛi:, but there is another type that had not been noticed before (e.g. Mandarin bing)–they mark contrast to a salient expectation. While bing and you have similar syntactic distribution, they have subtle differences in meaning: the use of you implies the speaker’s impatience with the hearer, but bing does not have this inference. I argue that bing and you are located between C and T, and have presuppositions (or conventional implicatures): bing not p presupposes that there is a salient proposition that ¬p contrasts with, while you not p presupposes that the speaker believes that ¬p was already in the Common Ground.

Open Journal Systems (Global Science & Technology Forum)
Quality Education
Openalex Percentile: Top 30%
Geochemistry and Geologic Mapping
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