Syntactic structures of Mandarin purposives

Wei-wen Roger Liao; Tzong-hong Jonah Lin

doi:10.1515/ling-2018-0032

Article

Syntactic structures of Mandarin purposives

Wei-wen Roger Liao and Tzong-hong Jonah Lin

Published/Copyright: January 10, 2019

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From the journal Linguistics Volume 57 Issue 1

Abstract

This paper investigates three constructions in Mandarin, all of which convey a purposive/teleological meaning, including the lai purposive, the hao purposive, and the bare purposive. Despite the fact that each type of purposive clause in Mandarin occurs at the right edge of a sentence, it is argued that none of the purposive clause is a genuine right adjunct in the underlying syntactic structure. On the other hand, our analysis shows that the lai purposive employs complementation of a secondary predicate, the hao purposive involves conjunction of two clauses, and the bare purposive should be analyzed as left adjunction that is stranded in the right edge after verb movement. The evidence for our analysis is drawn from subject and object gaps, the ba-construction in Mandarin, agentivity, and linear ordering of multiple purposive clauses. This work thus demonstrates representative cases where a structure that appears to involve right adjunction may in fact employ no right adjunction at all. The conclusion is thus consistent with the prediction of Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA).

Keywords: Mandarin; purposive; LCA; adjunction; phrase structure

Acknowledgements

The authors’ names are listed in alphabetical order. Jonah Lin and Roger Liao contributed equally to this work. An earlier version of this paper has been presented at FOSS at Academia Sinica, and unpublished versions of the paper have been circulated and cited in the Taiwan linguistic circle. We thank the audience in the venue and the colleagues who commented on earlier drafts of our paper. We would also like to thank Kuo-hua Wang for helping us at the early stage of the project. We are deeply grateful for the Editorial Board and four anonymous reviewers of Linguistics for their insightful questions and constructive comments. All errors remain ours alone.

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Published Online: 2019-01-10

Published in Print: 2019-01-26

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https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2018-0032

Keywords for this article

Mandarin; purposive; LCA; adjunction; phrase structure