The Syntax of V-V Resultatives in Mandarin Chinese, 1st ed. 2021

This book addresses the three fundamental properties of V-V resultative constructions in Mandarin Chinese: their generation, their syntactic structure, and their alternations. This book is original and new in the following aspects. First, adopting the ?inner vs. outer domain? theory, it provides new analysis and evidence that these compounds are generated in syntax, not in lexicon. Second, this book argues that the two subclasses of V-V resultative constructions, object-oriented vs. subject-oriented V-V resultatives, actually have different structures. Their syntactic contrasts have not been observed in the literature before. Third, this book is new in determining the syntactic structure of the V-V resultative constructions through their adverbial modification properties. It demonstrates that the previous isomorphism analysis of the syntactic structure of Chinese V-V resultatives does not hold. Finally, this book provides a new analysis of the issue of the alternations of V-V resultatives. In contrast to previous analyses, which generally view the causative alternation as the idiosyncratic property of particular V-V compounds, this book provides a principled analysis. 

This book makes a substantial improvement of the current understanding of the issues in the syntax of Mandarin Chinese and gives new support to certain theories of the generative grammar from the perspective of Mandarin Chinese.

    

 

Jianxun Liu received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Victoria Canada in 2019. Liu’s primary research areas are generative syntactic theory, the semantics/syntax interface, and the syntax of Chinese. Liu’s research particularly focuses on the two generative theories, Minimalist Program and Distributed Morphology, and their application in the study of Mandarin Chinese. Liu was awarded a doctoral fellowship by the Social and Humanities Research Council of Canada in 2016.