Title: The Syntactic Function of “gei” (给) Compared withClitic “se” of Romance and Slavic Languages
Lecturer: PAN Haihua (Professor of Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong)
Chairperson: ZUO Simin (Professor of Department of Chinese Language and Literature, East China Normal University)
Date: 9 am, December 7th, 2015 (Monday)
Venue: Room 5303, Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU
Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
Clitic “se” of Romance and Slavic languages can be used to mark several different kinds of sentence such as antipassive sentence, anticausative sentence, impersonal sentence and middle voice sentence. After comparing with the above phenomena, the lecturer expresses the following opinions: in modern Chinese, “gei” (给), which placed before the predicative verb in sentence, is a clitic the function of which is near “se”. “gei” can be marked antipassive sentence, anticausative sentence, and middle voice sentence. Otherwise it can be used in the sentence both using “ba” (把) and “bei” (被), sentence with verb copying construction, and focus sentence.