Scholars@Duke
Yunchuan Chen

Yunchuan Chen

Assistant Professor of the Practice of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Asian & Middle Eastern Studies
yunchuan.chen@duke.edu
Box 90414, Durham, NC 27708
Rm 225 2204 Erwin Road, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications

Decoding case markers: L1 Chinese L2 Japanese learners’ comprehension of Japanese OSV sentences

Journal Article Linguistics · April 4, 2025 AbstractIt is widely acknowledged that L2 learners whose native language lacks case markers often encounter difficulties when trying to acquire the usage of case markers in a second language. This article in ... Full text Open Access Cite

Scope assignment in Quantifier-Negation sentences in Tibetan as a heritage language in China

Journal Article Second Language Research · July 1, 2024 Quantifier-Negation sentences allow an inverse scope reading in Tibetan but not in Chinese. This difference can be attributed to the underlying syntactic difference: the negation word can be raised at Logical Form in Tibetan but not in Chinese. This study ... Full text Open Access Cite

An experimental investigation of the Deep Double-o Constraint in Japanese causative constructions

Journal Article Journal of Japanese Linguistics · May 27, 2024 AbstractThe Double-o Constraint (DoC) was proposed to explain the ungrammaticality of having two or more noun phrases (NPs) marked by the accusative case ... Full text Open Access Cite

Scope assignment in quantifier-negation sentences in early Korean-Chinese bilinguals’ grammars

Journal Article Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America · May 15, 2024 Quantifier-negation sentences allow an inverse scope reading in many languages, but this phenomenon is not observed in Chinese. Building on the work of Chen and Huan (2023), this study investigates whether early Korean-Chinese bilinguals can make a ... Full text Open Access Cite

An experimental approach to the reconstruction of the head quantifier phrase in Chinese relative clauses

Journal Article Canadian Journal of Linguistics · March 27, 2024 Aoun and Li (2003) argued that whether the head of Chinese relative clauses can reconstruct at Logical Form is determined by its phrasal category. When the head is a noun phrase, it can reconstruct; but when it is a quantifier phrase, it cannot. This paper ... Full text Open Access Cite

An Experimental Investigation into the Scope Assignment of Japanese and Chinese Quantifier-Negation Sentences

Journal Article Languages · March 1, 2024 Quantifier-Negation sentences such as all teachers did not use Sandy’s car are known to allow an inverse scope interpretation in English. However, there is a lack of experimental evidence to determine whether this interpretation is allowed in equivalent se ... Full text Open Access Cite

Bilingual processing of verbal and constructional information in English dative constructions: effects of cross-linguistic influence

Journal Article Cognitive Linguistics · November 25, 2022 AbstractThis study investigated the role of cross-linguistic influence in L2 learners’ integration of a verb and a construction during online English sentence processing. In a self-paced reading task, L1-English speakers an ... Full text Cite

Acquisition of Japanese relative clauses by L1 Chinese learners: Evidence from reflexive pronoun resolution

Journal Article Second Language Research · July 1, 2022 This article investigates whether first-language (L1) Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese as a second language (L2) can acquire the knowledge that the reflexive pronoun jibun ‘self’ within the head noun phrase of Japanese relative clauses cannot refer to ... Full text Open Access Cite

Simplified grammar in both languages? On scope assignment in Q-Neg sentences in English-dominant heritage Chinese speakers

Journal Article Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America · May 5, 2022 Quantifier-negation (Q-Neg) sentences are sentences like ‘All teachers did not use Donald’s car,’ where a negation word and universal quantifier occur in the subject position. There are both surface scope (all>not) and inverse scope (not>all) ... Full text Open Access Cite

Style shifts in Japanese video game commentary monologues

Journal Article Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America · May 5, 2022 Honorific markers play an integral role in many languages, but their purpose and meaning are still widely debated. Ide (1989) claims a one-to-one relationship between social rank difference and linguistic form, but Cook (1997, 2011) proposes that h ... Full text Open Access Cite

Anaphor reconstruction in Japanese relative clauses

Journal Article Language and Linguistics. 語言暨語言學 · March 17, 2021 AbstractThis study conducted two experiments to examine the derivation of the head noun phrase in Japanese relative clauses, with a focus on whether the anaphorsjibun‘self’ andjibun-j ... Full text Open Access Cite

Two types of possessive passives in Japanese

Journal Article Concentric. Studies in Linguistics · November 1, 2019 AbstractMany East Asian languages have possessive passives, whose subjects are interpreted as the possessor of the direct object. This paper investigates Japanese Possessive Passives (JP ... Full text Open Access Cite