On locative alternation verbs in Mandarin Chinese
This paper focuses on both single and compound locative alternation verbs in Mandarin Chinese. First, three
particular properties of locative alternation verbs are introduced and compared cross-linguistically with examples from Japanese
and English. Next, three properties are explored further and possible explanations are provided for the observed similarities and
differences between the languages. Finally, the syntactic patterns of locative alternation verbs in Mandarin Chinese are
investigated in the Sinica Corpus. The results show that the “oblique argument-verb-accusative argument” sentence pattern has the
highest percentage of appearance. This finding echoes Lin’s (2008) claim that Chinese
is not only a “topic prominent” language, but also a “locative prominent” language.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Some properties of Chinese locative alternation and a cross-linguistic comparison
- 3.The discussion
- 3.1Affectedness
- 3.2Argument drop
- 3.3The summary
- 4.Further investigation
- 4.1The syntactic patterns available
- 4.2The corpus study
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
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