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Part of
Interfaces in Grammar
Edited by Jianhua Hu and Haihua Pan
[Language Faculty and Beyond 15] 2019
► pp. 167–206

Chapter 7
The V-copy construction in Mandarin

A case temporarily reopened

| Research Institute for Linguistics (Hungarian Academy of Sciences) and Eötvös Loránd University
The focus of this study is the so-called verb-copy construction(s) of Mandarin Chinese, where two (or even more) copies of the same verb surface in a single clause, without any semantic consequence of this multiplicity. This family of constructions has received various analyses in the generative tradition (e.g., Tsao 1987; Huang 1988; Li 1990; Shi 1996; Paul 2002a, Gouguet 2005; Cheng 2007), each with its strengths and weaknesses. In recent years, there emerged some partially converging proposals that build on the minimalist framework of Chomsky (1995, 2000, 2001), and fundamentally agree that in these constructions both VP-level and V-level operations are involved (V-copy is not one construction, but a group of surface lookalikes, with different underlying structures), and syntactic effects are heavily interspersed with semantic/pragmatic and phonetic considerations in a proper account; see: Gouguet (2005), Bartos (2008), Cheng (2007), Tieu (2009). On the other hand, some other recent contributions (Fang & Sells 2007; Hsu 2008) seem to call several assumptions of the earlier analyses into question, and present data neglected by those proposals. The present paper briefly reviews the earlier accounts, examines and mostly refutes the new potential counterarguments, and refines Bartos’s earlier analysis to cater for the full range of structural variation involved, by incorporating certain compatible components of Gouguet’s (2005) and Tieu’s (2009) proposals into it.
Article outline
  • 1.Preliminaries
  • 2.Some key properties of the V-copy construction
    • 2.1VCC only occurs when the object is overtly postverbal
    • 2.2With intransitives: Only if the two copies of V are not adjacent (if at all…)
    • 2.3Asymmetry 1: V+Obj behaves as a constituent, while V+compl does not
    • 2.4Asymmetry 2: The order of the two copies along with their complement domains (i.e., V+Obj and V+compl) is fixed, not reversible
    • 2.5Asymmetry 3: Only the second occurrence of V is ‘active’ for aspectualization
    • 2.6Obligatory vs. optional VCC
      • 2.6.1VCC is optional with complements of result (res)
      • 2.6.2V-copy is obligatory with degree complements (deg)
      • 2.6.3With durative/frequency complements: VCC is obligatory if Obj is a weak definite, but optional otherwise
  • 3.An overview of earlier accounts
    • 3.1Analyses in government/binding theory and early Minimalism
    • 3.2Some recent non-unitary Minimalist analyses
  • 4.Some recent contributions, their evaluation, and their yield
    • 4.1Fang & Sells (2007) – a general critique of Chomskyan accounts
    • 4.2Hsu (2008): An information structural treatment of VCCs
    • 4.3Tieu (2009): An extended version of Cheng’s (2007) account
  • 5.The Proposal – Part 1: VCC with dur/freq phrases
    • 5.1The nature of VCC with durative/frequency compls
    • 5.2The determination of pronunciation for the copies
    • 5.3How the basic properties are derived
    • 5.4A partially similar construction
  • 6.The Proposal – Part 2: degree complements
    • 6.1Some remaining questions
      • 6.1.1Why can’t the ‘V+Deg’ unit be copied upwards just like ‘V+Obj’ in the dur/freq case?
      • 6.1.2How can the ‘V+Obj’ string be fronted, i.e., used as topic, etc.?
      • 6.1.3Why can’t V bear any aspect-marking in this type of VCC?
  • 7.The proposal – Part 3: Resultative compounds
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.15.07bar
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Huang, C.-T. James
2022. Finiteness, opacity, and Chinese clausal architecture. In New Explorations in Chinese Theoretical Syntax [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 272], ► pp. 17 ff. DOI logo
Lin, Jo-wang
2022. Chinese comparatives. In New Explorations in Chinese Theoretical Syntax [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 272], ► pp. 249 ff. DOI logo
Sells, Peter
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