Skip to main content

Yunchuan Chen

Assistant Professor of the Practice of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Asian & Middle Eastern Studies
Box 90414, Durham, NC 27708
Rm 225 2204 Erwin Road, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications


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 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

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 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

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 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 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