Speaker Biographies
Jens Hopperdietzel is an Assistant Professor (Akademischer Rat a.Z.) in the Department of German Language and Literature I at the University of Cologne. Prior to joining Cologne, he held a postdoctoral position at the University of Manchester, and he received his PhD from Humboldt University of Berlin. His research investigates how syntactic structure interacts with morphology and (lexical) semantics, drawing on evidence from typologically diverse languages, with a focus on the Oceanic languages Daakaka (Vanuatu) and Samoan. He is particularly interested in argument and event structure, especially in the context of complex predications, nominalizations, and applicative constructions.
Dr. Jianrong Yu earned his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA, and specializes in formal semantics, lexical semantics, and their interfaces with syntax and morphology. His work on verbal lexical semantics and degree and comparison constructions in various languages has appeared in journals such as Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Glossa, and the Journal of East Asian Linguistics, and has been presented at conferences worldwide. He previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven in Belgium and has held various teaching positions, including at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He currently works as an independent researcher.
Lecture Time & Venue
Lecture Time: December 18, 2025 (Thursday), 16:30–18:00
Lecture Venue: Room 103, Teaching Building No. 5, Songjiang Campus
Lecture Title
Licensing Non-Canonical Arguments in Mandarin
Lecture Abstract
Mandarin Chinese exhibits argument structure alternations in which so-called non-canonical arguments (NCAs), i.e., arguments that realize various oblique thematic roles, occupy the subject and object position in complementary distribution with agent and theme arguments (Li 2014, Lin 2001). Together with further word order alternations, Mandarin verbs therefore seemingly violate general principles of argument structure building at the morphosyntax-semantics interface concerning the mapping of thematic roles to grammatical functions. In this paper, we develop a unified account of NCA constructions as high applicatives (cf. Li 2022). In particular, we demonstrate that such alternations naturally follow from independent phenomena that combine in Mandarin NCA constructions, including anti-agentivity (Martin et al. 2023), non-recursive applicatives (Nie 2023), and the double object movement asymmetry (DOMA; Holmberg et al. 2019). Consequently, we integrate NCA constructions into the typology of applicative constructions, suggesting that applicative heads within and across languages vary according to their nominal licensing properties.
