<div style="line-height:1.7;color:#000000;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial"><div style="margin: 0;">In contemporary Chinese, such 'stand-alone' adverbs are common, such as '简直（了）——jianzhi-le, <i>Simply</i>', or the adverb with a suspending copular, without the predicative content, e.g. '真是——zhenshi, truely-be!'. They are used with intense emotional and perspective, often for intensification (of properties with polar and scaling potentials).</div><div style="margin: 0;"><br></div><div style="margin: 0;">Daily conversations are context-depent, which is generally believed to be one of the 'characters' of S-E Asian languages. Seen in another angle, the context dependence also means more or less free from morphosyntactic bounding, or even content/predicate burden. After all, when contexts are ostentious and 'sufficient', content of the predicates (states, events, property, etc. the content bearers) are sometimes superfluous. </div><div style="margin: 0;"><br></div><div style="position:relative;zoom:1"><div><br></div><div>Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences,</div><div>No.5 Jianguomennei Dajie, Beijing, China; 100732</div><div style="clear:both"></div></div><div id="divNeteaseMailCard"></div><p style="margin: 0;"><br></p><p>At 2021-12-03 19:01:38, "Bastian Persohn" <persohn.linguistics@gmail.com> wrote:</p><blockquote id="isReplyContent" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">Dear lingtyp members,<br class=""><br class="">Do you know of any good discussion of how clauses without any overt predicative content are interpreted, especially in regards to polarity?<br class=""><br class="">I’m thinking of the following type, where <i class="">bado</i> 'still' becomes its negative equivalent 'not yet' in the absence of overt predicative content, a pattern<div class="">that is attested in many languages around the globe.<div class=""><br class="">(1) <i class="">Imerudi kutengenezwa {au <b class="">bado</b>}?</i><br class="">it.has.returned be.fixed or still<br class="">ʻHas it (fan) be fixed again or not yet?ʼ<br class="">(Ashton 1947: 392)<br class=""><br class="">(2) <i class="">Kwa sasa maji yametoka mtoni (Malulumo) na kufika Mgera {lakini vijiji vingine <b class="">bado</b>}.</i><br class="">For now water it.has.come.from at.river M. and arrive M. but villages other still<b class=""><br class=""></b> ‘As for now, the water has come from the river (Malulumo) and reached Mgera, but not other villages yet.’</div><div class="">(Helsinki Corpus of Swahili 2.0)<br class=""> <br class="">Obviously, in (1, 2) the disjunctive context also plays a role, but cf. the Western Dani examples (3, 4).</div><div class="">Again, variations over the same theme appear to be pretty common.<br class=""><br class="">(3) <i class="">Yi <b class="">awo</b></i><br class="">river still<br class="">ʻThe river has not yet been swelled.ʼ</div><div class="">(Barclay 2008: 440)<br class=""><br class=""><div class="">(4) <i class="">Nin-ogoba <b class="">awo</b></i><br class="">our.father still<br class="">ʻOur father, no!ʼ (Barclay 2008: 441)</div></div></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Thanks a lot!</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Best,</div><div class="">Bastian</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><b class="">References</b></div><div class="">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;mso-fareast-language:
DE" class="">
</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" class="">Ashton, Ethel O. 1947. <i class="">Swahili grammar
(including intonation)</i>. London: Longmans, Green and Co</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class="">Barclay, Peter. 2008. </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class="">A grammar of Western Dani</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" class="">. Munich: Lincom.</span></p>
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