Chen, S. (2012). Minimality Effects and the Argument Structure of the Ba Construction: A Revisit to the “baP” Proposal. University of Washington Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 29. (original) (raw)
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The Syntax of Mandarin Bă: Reconsidering the Verbal Analysis
Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 2000
The bǎ construction is central to the study of Mandarin grammar. It has received many attempts at analysis and comes up frequently as a syntactic test in discussions of other phenomena. Yet, not even its part of speech has ever been convincingly established. This paper presents the case for treating bǎ as a verb, considering both language-internal arguments and arguments from universal properties of parts of speech. These arguments are intended to have cross-theoretic validity. On the basis of the conclusion that bǎ is a verb, an analysis is developed within the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar. On this analysis, bǎ selects for a subject, an object, and a complement clause, and further stipulates that its object controls the TOPIC function of its complement clause. This analysis is shown to account for both the core data and the data which is problematic for other analyses. Finally, the analysis is confirmed by evidence from telicity effects in the bǎ construction, universal properties of verbs and prepositions, and its compatibility with the known historical development of the construction. Section 7 presents an analysis of the bǎ construction in the framework of LFG. This analysis will be shown to uniformly capture both "core" and
The Mandarin LVS construction: Verb lexical semantics and grammatical aspect
Cognitive Linguistics, 2014
Two empirical studies -a verb elicitation experiment and a collostructional analysis -were conducted to investigate the Mandarin LVS construction with respect to the lexical semantics of the verb and its collocation with grammatical aspect. Converging evidence from both studies indicates strong schematicity and productivity in the verb category of the LVS construction. Although most exemplars fall into a few major lexical semantic clusters, there are more low-frequency marginal exemplars than previously recognized, reinforcing the constructional schema in an essentially radial category. In addition to the lexical semantic regularity of the verb slot, both studies showed the existence of highfrequency tokens with prototype status. As far as grammatical aspect is concerned, the converging evidence indicates that the LVS category is compatible not only with the durative aspect, but also with the perfective as well as the resultative and directional lexical aspect. The attraction of grammatical aspect to the verb of LVS is graded rather than absolute, with some mutual selection patterns more typical than others. The two grammatical aspects as marked by the durative -zhe and the perfective -le are non-interchangeable.
2001
Introduction: The Mandarin Chinese ba-construction and the German separable and inseparable prefix constructions are both examples of complex predicates. More specifically, they are what Mohanan (1997) [Bender, 112] has defined as “construction[s] in which two semantically predicative elements jointly determine the structure of a single syntactic clause.” Moreover, both constructions require resultative readings. The Mandarin ba is an object marker and has been analyzed as both a P and V. I will treat it as a verbal element in this paper (for arguments to support this choice, see Bender (2000)). The following is a linear representation of the ba-construction:
Empty verbs in Chinese predicatives and complex predicates
ZAS Papers in Linguistics
This paper investigates syntactic properties of verbless constructions in Chinese. Verbless constructions differ from constructions with overt verbs in three major respects. First, there is a VP-internal nominal raising in Chinese, which is optional if an overt verb shows up, and obligatory if there is no overt verb. Second, while an overt verb can select various kinds of argument, the internal argument of a verbless construction cannot be indefinite. Third, there are two types of object depictive secondary predication constructions, and only one of them allows for a null verb.
An Approximation to Secondary Predication Structure: A Case of V-qilai in Mandarin Chinese
Language and Linguistics
This study re-examines the widely studied V-qilai 'rise-come' construction in Mandarin Chinese. It first distinguishes V-qilai + predicate construction from the lexical verb qilai and -qilai as a lexical inchoative morpheme, which do not require an additional complement. In addition, three variations of the V-qilai + predicate pattern are identified according to the complement functions: namely (i) a descriptive complement, (ii) an object-oriented descriptive predicate, and (iii) a proposition clause (raising construction). These three variants are subsumed under and accounted for by the proposed uniformed secondary predication structure, while vary with their respective complement structures. In addition, the occurrences of V-qilai were drawn from Academia Sinica Corpus. Based on the above classification, it is shown that there is a far greater preponderance of canonical qilai usages over the V-qilai + complement ones, indicating that the latter patterns are still emerging ...
On the syntax of non-verbal predication in Mandarin Chinese
2009
The central issue of this study is nominal predication in Mandarin Chinese, which specifically refers to the construction composed of a subject and a nominal predicate without the intervention of a copula. Based on Davidson's (1967) event theory, especially the neo-Davidsonian event theory (Parsons 1990; Chierchia 1995, among many others), which claims that each sentence is endowed with a Davidsonian event/state argument, this study intends to give a unified account to the copulaless nominal predication construction in Mandarin Chinese, i.e., the grammaticality of the nominal predicate construction is dependent on whether the Davidsonian argument is visible or not. Three types of nominal predicate constructions are examined, namely, the constructions whose predicates are temporal/locative nominals, modified noun phrases and possessive noun phrases. The three types of copulaless nominal predication constructions, distinctive as their syntactic manifestations are, have one vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
The structures of depictive and resultative constructions in Chinese
ZAS Papers in Linguistics, 2001
In this paper I firstly argue that secondary predicates are complement of v, and v is overtly realized by Merge or Move in secondary predication in Chinese. The former option derives the de-construction, whereas the latter option derives the V-V construction. Secondly, I argue that resultatives are hosted by complement vPs, whereas depictives are hosted by adjunct vPs. This complement-adjunct asymmetry accounts for a series of syntactic properties of secondary predication in Chinese: the position of a secondary predicate with respect to the verb of the primary predicate, the co-occurrence patterns of secondary predicates, the hierarchy of depictives, the control and ECM properties of resultative constructions, and the locality constraint on the integration of secondary predicates into the structure of primary predication. Thirdly, I argue that the surface position of de is derived by a PF operation which attaches de to the right of the leftmost verbal lexical head of the construction. Finally, I argue that in the V-V resultative construction, the assumed successive head-raising may account for the possible subject-oriented reading of the resultative predicate, and that the head raising out of the lower vP accounts for the possible non-specific reading of the subject of the resultative predicate.
Event Structure and the Encoding of Arguments: The Syntax of the Mandarin and English Verb Phrase
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Mandarin Directional Serial Verb Constructions: A Constructionist Approach
2016
This thesis presents a neo-constructionist theory to account for a couple of puzzles centring around the Mandarin directional serial verb constructions (DSVC), such as song tang jin lai ‘send soup enter come'. Mandarin DSVCs are divided into seven types. I first look into the word order alternations observed with certain types of DSVCs. I find that the word order variants differ in telicity and their interaction with the aspectual morpheme le, the potential morphemes de/bu and the negation bu/mei. Then the DSVCs involving no word order alternations are also examined. I compare the distribution of le and the locative object in all types of DSVCs. The relation between the metaphoric interpretation and the syntactic position of directional verbs is also discussed. To cover the data, I propose that syntax first generates an eventuality-encoding structure for the lexical items to be inserted. In this structure, VP is sandwiched between a series of functional projections including Res...