Ying Gong defends dissertation!

Huge congratulations to Ying Gong, who successfully defended her excellent dissertation, “Gradability puzzles in Ersu: Evaluativity, Markedness, and Directional Morphemes” on July 9, 2026.

Abstract:

This dissertation investigates the semantics of gradable predicates in Ersu, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language. It focuses on two main puzzles. The first puzzle concerns the morpheme ya- and its interaction with the semantic property of evaluativity. The second puzzle concerns directional prefixes, which can be used to form degree achievement predicates with gradable roots. Both puzzles lead to a greater understanding of broader issues in the theory of meaning.

New fieldwork shows that ya-, a prefix that accompanies many Ersu gradable adjectives, has a complex distribution that is conditioned by syllable count, polarity, construction type, their interaction. In cases where it is optional, it gives rise to evaluativity inferences. Despite its complexity, this pattern follows from a small set of independently motivated assumptions: a ban on monosyllabic degree phrases; two markedness hierarchies—negative adjectives more marked than positive ones, ya-prefixed forms more marked than bare ones; and a principle that maps marked forms to marked readings. The case of Ersu shows that markedness competition can draw on several multiple markedness hierarchies at once, and a single, flat competition among their alternatives can generate the correct marked-meaning inferences.

The second puzzle deals with the hallmark feature of Qiangic languages – directional prefixes that often encode spatial directions (up/down/in/out). Building on work showing that these prefixes are semantically active, this dissertation argues that the particular semantic contribution of these prefixes in degree achievement predicates tracks the spatial direction of change with dimensional gradable roots, and offers a compositional analysis that formally derives the distribution of prefixes with dimensional gradable roots. In order to do so, the dissertation extends Vector-space semantics with the notion of frame of reference and proposes a measurement convention that involves a special measuring frame. Gradable roots are taken to return object-boundary-anchored vectors, pointing outward (along the relevant axis) for positive roots and inward for negative ones. Prefix-root pairing is derived through matching of vector directions. The spatial ontology developed in this chapter has potential to be extended to other phenomena in natural language grounded in physical space.