On the Dynamicity of Chinese Grammar: With Splittable Compounds and Fake Attributive Construction as Examples

According to Cognitive Grammar, linguistic structure is inherently dynamic, i.e. sequentially accessing and co-activating conceptual elements on different time scales. From this dynamic perspective, two tricky problems involving constituency, i.e. splittable compounds and the fake attributive construction, can be solved naturally. For the former, the split usage differs from the lumping one in that it involves word-sized window rearrangement. For the latter, "N1 de N2" resides in accessing two nominals serially. The fake attributive interpretation originates from their cognitive connection specified by the relevant syntactic context. In brief, different types of linguistic structures represent different paths to access and activate conceptual content. These structures are just what we saw and there is no necessity to propose syntactic operations only for the sake of theoretical demands.