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On preverbal lai in Mandarin Chinese

 | National Chiayi University
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Abstract
In this paper, I argue that the auxiliary-like preverbal lai ‘come,’ which frequently appears before purposives in Mandarin Chinese, is actually a light verb located in the v position. The current light v analysis incorporates aspects of previous analyses of bare and gei purposives while providing a simpler explanation for relevant phenomena. Additionally, the proposal bolsters the argument that gei in the post-object gei phrase in various constructions is a verb (e.g., Lin, T.-H. Jonah, and Yu-Shan Huang. 2015. Structures of the Mandarin gei constructions. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 24.31:309–338. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The results of an empirical survey testing speaker judgments of sentences with lai and its antonym qu ‘go’ confirm the prediction that lai is a light verb that can appear in possible light v positions across sentences. Some differences in acceptance rates and preferences for lai or qu may be due to the bleached semantic content of lai and qu, frequency of usage, and processing difficulties arising from reference ambiguity.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Purposives
    • 2.1Bare purposives
    • 2.2Gei purposives
  • 3.The proposal
    • 3.1The structure
    • 3.2The post-object gei phrase
  • 4.Further issues
    • 4.1Lai and qu
    • 4.2The differences
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • List of abbreviations
  • References
References (30)
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