On "[you] + VP" Construction in Mandarin Chinese

Download or read book On "[you] + VP" Construction in Mandarin Chinese written by Xin Li and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis investigates a newly developed construction, "you + VP," in Mandarin Chinese. The semantic function, syntactic distribution, as well as the co-occurrence restrictions of you and verbs are examined in this work. Given that "you + VP" construction is fairly new in Mandarin Chinese, a rating system on the scale of 1 - 4 is used throughout the work to ensure the acceptability of example sentences. First, by showing the compatibility of you and viewpoint aspects in Mandarin Chinese and by examining the differences between you and the perfective suffix -le, I argue that the pre-predicate you in "you + VP" construction is not an alternative of perfective -le, as proposed in previous literature (e.g., Tsai, 2012; Shi, 2004; Jing, 2005; Chen and Wang, 2010; among others). In fact, the pre-predicate you does not itself express aspectual information. Semantically, the pre-predicate you asserts the existence of a certain event. When the situation denoted by the VP following you is non-specific, you asserts at least one occurrence of the situation. When the situation is specific, on the other hand, you asserts the existence of the bounded situation (c.f. Lee, 2018). In other words, the pre-predicate you must select a bounded situation that has an initial endpoint and a final endpoint. Chapter three, four, and five investigate the syntactic distributions of "you + VP." By inspecting the co-occurrence conditions of "you + VP" and Chinese modals, I propose that you is above vP and under deontic modals. The full hierarchy is as follows: Epistemic modals> TP> AspP> Deontic modals> YouP> vP> Dynamic modals. In addition, the structure accounts for the ill-formed "you + VP + le" sequence, which results from the failure of covertly moving "V-le" from v to Asp. Moreover, the fact that multiple aspect markers can co-occur suggest that there are multiple aspect projections in MC, following the sequence: TP> Asp perfective> MP deontic> YouP> Asp perfect> Asp progressive> Asp durative> vP. The inspection of verbs in "you + VP" construction suggests that you selects verbs with an external argument (Chapter 4). Still, more tests are required to determine the generalizability of "you + VP" construction serving as a test to distinguish between different types of verbs. Further examination of "you + VP" in embedded clauses reveals that you is sensitive to the complement and adjunct distinction (Chapter 5). However, the more acceptable adverbial clauses of reason and condition call for future research in this direction