Causative Light Verbs

Natural and non-natural kinds have significant differences. This paper explores the subclasses of each kind and establishes the type system for event nouns. These nouns are divided into natural types, artifactual types, complex types (including natural complex types and artifactual complex types). This new classification not only enriches the Generative Lexicon theory, but also helps us to capture the properties of different types of event nouns.

Venice. During these four years, I had an amazing time both professionally and personally: I had the chance to meet or even work with wonderful teachers, as well as spend great time with incredible colleagues who became my friends, work as a tutor and travel abroad at various conferences and for research purposes. First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Alessandra Giorgi, who guided me in my study of Linguistics, giving me constant advice, suggestions, and, at the same time, emotional support. Apart from being an amazing teacher, she has also been like a mother to me. She has done everything in her power to help me during these four years, and it is thanks to her that I did not feel as a foreigner in Italy. Apart from her constant support in my thesis, I had the chance to work as a tutor of linguistics for her course, and I was thus given the opportunity to practice my teaching skills and learn a lot of new things, an opportunity for which I am extremely grateful and which I am sure will help me a lot in the future. I would also like to thank Professor Guglielmo Cinque and Professor Giuliana Giusti, for being so kind as to receive me whenever I had questions related to my thesis, and giving me suggestions that were very helpful. I also had a chance to work as a tutor of English Language for Giuliana Giusti, and she helped me organize my lessons with extreme kindness. I have benefited a lot from the suggestions of Professor Alexandra Cornilescu, from the University of Bucharest, who helped me with much needed bibliography, and pointed out to certain aspects I had neglected. Her contribution is much more important though. Professor Alexandra Cornilescu was one of the teachers who instilled in me the passion for linguistics, and made me choose this path. I had the chance to attend her courses both during the BA and the MA of Linguistics, and her enthusiasm and love for language science always amazed me and the other students. Larisa Avram is another teacher I am deeply grateful to, I wrote my BA and MA thesis under her surveillance, and her observations helped me shape my mind, and determined me to choose Linguistics for the future. Another thanks goes to Mihaela Dogaru, a teacher very close to my heart. Apart from attending her classes during the MA, I also had the wonderful opportunity of working with her before, when preparing myself for the Faculty of Foreign Languages. She made me fall in love with the English language, and I am most grateful to her for this.

This paper contributes to the discussion on causative-unaccusative verb pairs in English and Hungarian. It examines numerous assumptions in derivational detransitivisation analyses of such verbs and shows that these assumptions are empirically inadequate. A non-derivational analysis is proposed as an alternative, which seems to be void of the problems that derivational analyses suffer from.

For decades, passives as a major grammatical category in both English and Chinese have been subject to much research, both corpus-based and non-corpus-based. A number of contrastive studies of passives in English and Chinese have been published, but they have not used corpus data, being based, rather, on a handful of examples which are common to nearly all of those papers (e.g.

In Mandarin, a nominal may follow a string that is composed of a monomorphemic verb and its monomorphemic object. The nominal exhibits the same constraints as a preverbal PP. Also, unlike a canonical or non-canonical object, such a nominal cannot be deleted. It is argued that such a nominal is the object of a preposition; the PP is base-generated as a left adverbial of a shortest transitive VP; and after the leftward raising of the light VP and deletion of the preposition, the nominal surfaces to the right of the VP. Based on this study, the paper reports a form economy in syntactic operations.

In this study, I take an aspectual approach to the syntax and semantics of postverbal locative zai-phrases in Mandarin Chinese. Verb scalar properties are shown to determine verb co-occurrence with the postverbal locative zai-phrase, and to determine the interpretation of the zai-phrase. I address the question why postverbal locative zai-phrases sometimes have a directional meaning and sometimes do not using event structure. The zai-phrase has a locative reading when the location denoted by the zai-phrase and the event denoted by the verb are cotemporaneous, and thus homogeneous; it has a directional reading when they are not cotemporaneous, and thus not homogeneous. The non-homogeneity suggests that there are two subevents: one denoted by the predicate and one denoted by the zai-phrase. These two subevents are temporally independent. I posit that time lag indicates spatial path.

This research proposes a new theory of direct causation and examines how this concept plays a key role in the linguistic coding and individuation of causal events. According to the no-interveningcause hypothesis, a causal chain can be described by a single-clause sentence and construed as a single event if there are no intervening causers between the initial causer and the final causee. Consistent with this hypothesis, participants used single-clause sentences (lexical causatives) more often than two-clause sentences (e.g. periphrastic causatives) for causal chains in which (1) the causer and causee touched (Experiments 1 and 2), and (2) an intervening entity could be construed as an enabling condition rather than another cause (Experiments 2-4). In addition, event judgments paralleled linguistic descriptions: chains that could be described with single-clause expressions were more often construed as single events than chains that could not (Experiments 1-3). Implications for languages other than English, for the linguistic coding of accidental outcomes and for the relationship between cognition and language in general are discussed.

This paper presents the results of an empirical investigation into the characteristics of unaccusativity in Mandarin by building on the gradient approach to split intransitivity (Sorace, 2000) and previous analyses of Mandarin within that framework (Liu, 2007). The study explores the acceptability of unaccusative verbs in the verb-subject construction with respect to their core-peripheral features. The results clearly demonstrate support for the gradient approach; however, some important departures from the patterns observed in Western European languages are noted. The analysis of variability between and within semantic categories reveals that verbs in certain peripheral categories exhibit behaviour more characteristic of core unaccusative verbs; conversely, some members of the core category Change of Location display characteristics more typical of peripheral verbs. A refined definition of peripheral verbs (true and pseudo) is proposed which has relevance for the cross-linguistic s...

This article is concerned with the problem of argument-function mismatch observed in the (apparent) subject-object inversion in Chinese consumption verbs, e.g., chi 'eat' and he 'drink', and accommodation verbs, e.g., zhu 'live' and shui 'sleep'. These verbs seem to allow the linking of 3agent-SUBJ theme-OBJ4 as well as 3agent-OBJ theme-SUBJ4, but only when the agent is also the semantic role denoting the measure or extent of the action. The account o¤ered is formulated within LFG's lexical mapping theory. Under the simplest and also the strictest interpretation of the argument-function mapping principle (or the y-criterion), a composite role such as ag-ext receives syntactic assignment via one composing role only; the second composing role must be suppressed. Apparent subject-object inversion occurs when in the competition between the two composing roles, agext, the agent loses out and is suppressed. This account also facilitates a natural explanation of markedness among the competing syntactic structures.

En este trabajo se explora el alcance de la distinción entre “predicación de Individuo” y “predicación de Estadio” en el fenómeno de la alternancia copular del español (“ser” / “estar”), lo que representa uno de los interrogantes más destacados de la gramática española. Se observa que la tendencia actual a rechazar la asociación de los dos fenómenos (ser-Individuo / estar-Estadio) se debe a la falta de una interpretación definitiva de la distinción Individuo / Estadio, la cual ha sido concebida desde sus primeros hallazgos como un contraste borroso entre cualidades permanentes y transitorias. Tras comprobar que ningún criterio alternativo de los propuestos hasta la fecha es representativo de la distribución de “ser” y “estar”, aquí se asume una nueva interpretación de la distinción Individuo / Estadio, como una dicotomía aspectual entre predicados de «propiedad» –desprovistos de todo contenido aspectual– y predicados de «evento», y se argumenta que este nuevo análisis, a la vez que favorece una adecuada comprensión de la dicotomía aspectual en cuestión, justifica plenamente la distribución de las cópulas “ser” y “estar”, la cual puede ser asumida como una manifestación de la distinción Individuo / Estadio en el dominio de la predicación no verbal.

As with most fields of life, China can trace its history of word standardization back to ancient times, when the first dictionaries (such as Erya, ca. 3 rd century B.C.) appeared. Modern Standard Chinese used in Mainland China-Putonghua-has been subject to standardization since its proclamation as the official national language of China in 1956. The definition states quite clearly that its base is formed by the Northern dialects. This statement concerns also vocabulary. However, it is not a simple matter to make a choice of words which are to be used throughout the country. On the one hand, the so-called "Northern dialects" are spoken by almost 70% of the Han Chinese population, i.e. by about 800 million people. Although the Northern dialects are said to be quite uniform, the vast area that they cover must bring diversity in vocabulary. On the other hand, the remaining 30% of the Han Chinese speak a range of mutually unintelligible tongues, which are bound to penetrate the Northern dialects. The aim of this paper is to show how the lexicon of Putonghua is being codified. An attempt will be made to reveal how the basic vocabulary was selected during the forming of Putonghua in the 1950s. Some of the tools used by the State Language Commission in order to control the process of vocabulary standardization will be described. Moreover, the paper intends to describe the ongoing changes in the Chinese lexicon. It will show the sources of new words that are gradually accepted into the authoritative dictionaries of modern Chinese.

I am happy to have the opportunity here to thank a number of people that have been of great help in completing this thesis. First and foremost, I want to thank Ida Toivonen and Kate Kearns, my supervisors. Ida's critical and challenging comments, and Kate's helpful and optimistic comments have been invaluable. I want to thank no less my friends, family and all the other people who filled in those numerous questionnaires (and who have been doing so for years!). Without them this research would not have been possible. Also thanks to those who supplied me with data that they picked up from the Dutch media. I especially want to express my gratitude to Heidi Quinn, for giving me a crash course on Minimalism, for her continuous availability, and for her infectious enthusiasm and passion for syntax. I have had a fantastic time in New Zealand, which, besides studying Linguistics at the University of Canterbury, is largely due to the wonderful people I met here. So cheers to you all! However, none of this would have been so fantastic without Henrik. I thank him for his inexhaustible support, optimism, encouragement and …. TLC.

I am happy to have the opportunity here to thank a number of people that have been of great help in completing this thesis. First and foremost, I want to thank Ida Toivonen and Kate Kearns, my supervisors. Ida's critical and challenging comments, and Kate's helpful and optimistic comments have been invaluable. I want to thank no less my friends, family and all the other people who filled in those numerous questionnaires (and who have been doing so for years!). Without them this research would not have been possible. Also thanks to those who supplied me with data that they picked up from the Dutch media. I especially want to express my gratitude to Heidi Quinn, for giving me a crash course on Minimalism, for her continuous availability, and for her infectious enthusiasm and passion for syntax. I have had a fantastic time in New Zealand, which, besides studying Linguistics at the University of Canterbury, is largely due to the wonderful people I met here. So cheers to you all! However, none of this would have been so fantastic without Henrik. I thank him for his inexhaustible support, optimism, encouragement and …. TLC.

Chinese is commonly believed to be an analytic language, but evidence from philological works and cross-linguistic comparisons clearly suggests that various morphological operations existed in Old Chinese. The loss of Chinese morphology can be explained by the ideographic nature of Chinese characters: the Chinese language has been evolving in a way that stabilizes the pronunciation of each character. The effects of writing systems on language evolution can be widely observed from world languages, while writing per se has been evolving along the path of phonetization driven mainly by borrowings instead of conscious linguistic analysis. In history, language never picked writing systems based on linguistic features; instead, writing systems affect the evolutionary paths of languages: single signs of a writing system stabilize the basic units of the language.

In this paper we propose using the distributional differences in the syntactic patterns of near-synonyms to deduce the relevant components of verb meaning. Our method involves determining the distributional differences in syntactic patterns, deducing the semantic features from the syntactic phenomena, and testing the semantic features in new syntactic frames. We determine the distributional differences in syntactic patterns through the following five steps: First, we search for all instances of the verb in the corpus. Second, we classify each of these instances into its type of syntactic function. Third, we classify each of these instances into its argument structure type. Fourth, we determine the aspectual type that is associated with each verb. Lastly, we determine each verb's sentential type. Once the distributional differences have been determined, then the relevant semantic features are postulated. Our goal is to tease out the lexical semantic features as the explanation, and as the motivation of the syntactic contrasts.

Different from English and Albanian, verbs in Chinese-Mandarin, do not conjugate across pronouns which perform the action. They have no inflectional nature and features in none of the grammatical tenses which are in the focus of this paper. The Chinese verbs never go through case and person! This phenomenon, in a way makes life easier for the non-native learner of Chinese, not having to remember all verb particles in order to create the time effect, to express an action. It makes easier for the learners of this ‘mega language’, spoken by more than 1.300.000.000 people, to learn it easily. Given this, the word order in Chinese sentences is, very crucial. This order is the only alternative, to show the foreign learner, the effect of the relationship between the subject and the verb. Furthermore, the word order, changes compared to the one in Albanian and English, especially in cases when we have to deal with actions asking questions of interrogative character, which in a way remain th...

This paper discusses result complements and phase complements in Chinese, both of which are postverbal elements. Despite their surface similarity, they are different with respect to argument realization. While the result complements allow complicated argument realization (in terms of semantic host, verbal transitivity, and subcategorization of objects), the phase complements function as lexical aspect markers, or Aktionsarten, and do not participate in argument realization. I adopt a constructional approach, particularly Boas's (2003) event-frames and linking rules. Inverted causative resultative constructions in Chinese are also discussed. They are strong evidence for "constructional participants" that interact with event participants in determining syntactic realizations.

This study examines the acquisition of Mandarin dative constructions by second language (L2) and heritage learners of Mandarin Chinese. Three groups of speakers (L2, heritage, and native, 20 in each group) participated in this study by completing a questionnaire consisting of sentence translation and grammaticality judgment tasks on Mandarin dative constructions. In both tasks, native speakers outperformed the heritage learners, who in turn outperformed the L2 learners. The variance of performance in the two tasks across groups can be attributed to several factors, including linguistic universal, first language (L1) transfer, and individual difference. This study shows that L2 acquisition is a complex system and no single factor can fully explain or predict L2 learning outcomes. The findings of this study also have important pedagogical implications for L2 Chinese teaching.

This article proposes a new description of Cantonese causative–resultative constructions (CRCs), constructions with two verbal elements relevant to the cause and the effect of an event respectively. We present a constructional schema for the CRC with three argument types and without using traditional categories—such as subject, object and pseudo-passivation, present various syntactic and semantic properties, and subsume constructions such as the comparative construction and numerous particle constructions under this banner. We then argue against traditional approaches to CRCs with two lexical verbs that treat the argument structure of the CRC as composed from argument structures of individual verbs (the decompositional approach); instead, CRC arguments belong to the entire construction and have only semantic orientation-based relationships with individual verbs (the holistic approach). We show how our account can shed light on Sinitic typology and the grammaticalisation mechanism of...

There are three ways of deriving verbs in Dutch: through zero marking, through suffixation, and through prefixation. We focus on prefixed deadjectival verbs, contrasting two views. According to the first view, prefixed verbs are left-headed: the prefix is responsible for the change in category, i.e. [V ver [A breed]]. The second view holds that prefixed verbs are right-headed, and involve a zero verbalizing suffix, i.e. [V ver [V [A breed] ∅]]. We argue in this paper for a mixed, nanosyntactic, approach. We adopt Ramchand’s (2008) decomposition of the verb and argue that the prefix spells out part of the verbal structure and the verbal root spells out another part.

The A-NOT-A structure is one way to express polar questions in Mandarin Chinese. The present study provides a constraint-based analysis of A-NOT-A questions in Mandarin Chinese within the framework of HPSG (Pollard & Sag, 1994) and MRS (Copestake et al., 2005). We propose two possible approaches to analysing the A-NOT-A structure — a morphological/lexical approach as well as a syntactic approach — and illustrate their implementation, as well as their respective strengths and weaknesses.

Resultative phrases are generally believed to conform to the Direct Object Restriction: that is, they describe the direct object if verbs are transitive. However, some exceptions have occasionally been reported, and this paper investigates the problem by focusing on resultative phrases that occur with the valency alternation verbs in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. Verbs that license the locative alternation and locatum-subject alternation describe events that involve two arguments, the location and the locatum, which are perceived to concurrently undergo a change of state. It will be shown that resultative phrases with a valency alternation verb can be predicated of either argument regardless of whether it is expressed as direct object. Furthermore, resultative verbal suffixes in Mandarin, interpreted as description of either the location or the locatum, give rise to the locative alternation while their interpretation remains the same. Thus, it is claimed that in Japanese and Mandar...

PersPred is a manually elaborated multilingual syntactic and semantic Lexicon for Persian Complex Predicates (CPs), referred to also as “Light Verb Constructions” (LVCs) or “Compound Verbs”. CPs constitutes the regular and the most common way of expressing verbal concepts in Persian, which has only around 200 simplex verbs. CPs can be defined as multi-word sequences formed by a verb and a non-verbal element and functioning in many respects as a simplex verb. Bonami & Samvelain (2010) and Samvelian & Faghiri (to appear) extendedly argue that Persian CPs are MWEs and consequently must be listed. The first delivery of PersPred, contains more than 600 combinations of the verb zadan ‘hit’ with a noun, presented in a spreadsheet. In this paper we present a semi-automatic method used to extend the coverage of PersPred 1.0, which relies on the syntactic information on valency alternations already encoded in the database. Given the importance of CPs in the verbal lexicon of Persian and the f...

It has long been observed that an eventuality may be associated with at most one delimitation. This paper argues that the incompatibility between Mandarin verbal reduplications and several post-verbal result-denoting elements is one of the cases to which the one-delimitation principle applies. The discussion of Mandarin verbal reduplication contributes to our understanding of the one-delimitation principle by showing that (i) the one-delimitation principle not only applies to resultatives but also other result-denoting elements; (ii) vP is the domain for the one-delimitation principle.

This paper investigates the transitive uses of the verb fan "annoy; be annoyed; bother to do", which exhibit both similarities and disparities between Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin, as far as the data from Gigaword corpus, containing data from Mainland China (XIN) and Taiwan (CNA), are concerned. In terms of similarities, the causative (and agentive) use(s) of the transitive fan is/are shared by both Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin. The disparity mainly lies in the mental use of fan "be annoyed", which is not only unattested in the corpus of Taiwan Mandarin but also reported as weird by our informants. This mental use, on the other hand, is well attested in the corpus. In order to describe as well as explain the difference in uses between Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin, we adopt the Theta System Theory (Reinhart 2002; Marelj 2004) to probe into the argument structures of the transitive verb fan and further pinpoint the fundamental syntactic difference between Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin, that is, the absence or presence of the /+c feature in the argument structure. In particular, Taiwan Mandarin requires the obligatory presence of the /+c feature in the argument structure of fan, while Beijing Mandarin does not.

This paper examines variation in the interpretation of the Chinese verbal suffix ‑le and attributes it to a process of ongoing change in which an original aspectual system is gradually developing into a new tense system. The paper argues that the incremental pattern of re-grammaticalization can best be captured in a minimalist feature-based approach to the licensing of morphology, which factors clines of development into formally discrete, individual steps.

This paper argues that the Invertible Construction (IC) in Chinese is a kind of distributive construction. What appears to be an inversion of word order is best understood as the division of the theme NP to be acted upon by a number of agents for an embedded event. This analysis best captures a number of otherwise intractable properties of the IC including the necessarily quantitative interpretation of the NPs and the incompatibility with adverbs of volition.

La loi du 11 mars 1957 n'autorisant, aux termes des alinéas 2 et 3 de l'article 41, d'une part, que les « copies ou reproductions strictement réservées à l'usage privé du copiste et non destinées à une utilisation collective », et d'autre part, que les analyses et les courtes citations dans un but d'exemple et d'illustration, « toute représentation ou reproduction intégrale, ou partielle, faite sans le consentement de l'auteur ou de ses ayants-droit ou ayants-cause, est illicite » (alinéa 1 er de l'article 40). Cette représentation ou reproduction, par quelque procédé que ce soit, constituerait donc une contrefaçon sanctionnée par les articles 425 et suivants du Code Pénal.

This paper aims to present syntactic study and description of the noun phrase in Mandarina Chines language. Moreover, it shows the basic modifier of noun phrase in Mandarin Chines. First, Mandarin a language that classify as headinitial S-V-O which allow to the noun to appears in both position subject and object. In additional, present all possible noun phrase conditions of the Internal distribution of noun phrase in Mandarin such as common noun, classifier, Modifier phrase marked by {de}, adjective, preposition, relative clause and multiple modifier. Finally, after I examine the noun phrase, found that the main order is Noun,

Previous studies have suggested that, like Japanese, Hindi displays a preference for intransitive constructions that describe events as spontaneous occurrences over transitive constructions that give prominence to the agent. This study compares the frequency of transitive and intransitive constructions in the two languages by using a Hindi novel and its Japanese translation as a parallel corpus. The results show that not only was there no significant difference in the number of transitive and intransitive constructions, the frequency of transitivity pairs (causative/non-causative pairs) is also similar with both languages using more non-causative pairs. The implication of this finding for errors observed in Hindi-speaking learners of Japanese is discussed.

Resultative verb compounds (RVCs) in Mandarin appear in a V1-V2 sequence and have three major subtypes-result-state, directional and completive RVCs with different degrees of compositionality depending on the extent to which the compound's meaning can be derived from the meanings of the component verbs. The derivation of the RVC has been analyzed as a lexical or syntactic process. Previous acquisition studies show that the RVC's compositionality and event structure are not fully acquired before the age of three. Findings conflict on whether the acquisition process revealed by early RVCs is usage-based or rule-based. We examined longitudinal data from two Mandarin-speaking children and administered a novel verb experiment on 32 children. The lexicalist approach to RVC formation is a better account for our data than the syntactic approach. Our data lend support to rule-based learning of RVCs. Children master the event structure of RVCs and its interaction with aspect gradually. The headedness of the RVC in relation to event structure depends Acknowledgments This article was based on my MPhil thesis written under the supervision of Thomas Hun-tak Lee as a member of the Language Acquisition Lab at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. See endnote 1 for more.

This paper studies two linguistic constructions in Finnish, the go-say construction and the come-say construction. Both constructions contain a motion verb and a speech act verb in the 3rd infinitive illative case. The article focuses specifically on how the constructions express a speaker's or writer's affective stance. The analysis in this paper is inter-linguistic and it relies on the theories and methods used in corpus linguistics, interactional linguistics and cognitive semantics. This paper analyses, describes and explains the collocational, social and cognitive motivations behind the affective meanings of these constructions. Finally, it discusses the benefits and challenges of combining three different linguistic theories and methodologies in the analysis of a linguistic construction.

This study aims to provide a detailed comparison of locative inversion in Mandarin Chinese with-zhe and (stative) locative inversion in Kinyarwanda. After a brief description of these constructions, the study shows that they are similar in many respects and involve similar restrictions despite the fact that the two languages are genetically unrelated: the agent is deleted and disallowed even in a by-agent phrase; the verb belongs to the type of verbs referred to as placement verbs; and it must express a state after the action. These constructions are incompatible with adverbs of manner as well as some placement verbs that do not entail duration after the action, which is typical of stativization. After a detailed comparison of locative inversion in the two languages, it is concluded that despite the fact that the two languages are not related, the locative inversion in Chinese with-zhe has properties similar to those of (stative) locative inversion in Kinyarwanda. It is proposed that although these constructions are referred to as locative inversion, they are primarily stative constructions in which the locative happens to be in a subject position, where it can alternate with the theme.

RESULTATIVE PREDICATES AS EVENT MEASURES * * This paper is a part of Chapter 4 of my unpublished doctoral dissertation, submitted to Osaka University, 2007. I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Yukio Oba and Prof. Sadayuki Okada for their invaluable comments and criticism, and to Joe and Paul A.S. Harvey, who worked as informants. I would like to thank Paul. A.S. Harvey for stylistic improvements. This work is partially supported by a grant allotted to the author by JSPS. 1 It has been well acknowledged that NPs are restricted in the position of the XP in this construction (Simpson 1983).

Resumen En este trabajo nos proponemos analizar la colocación latina poena afficere, 'imponer un castigo', un tipo de colocación con especificidades tanto sintácticas como semánticas que la distinguen de las construcciones verbo-nominales más prototípicas: el sustantivo predicativo funciona no como Objeto Directo sino como tercer argumento del verbo soporte, un esquema sintáctico que, como intentaremos demostrar, resulta ideal para la expresión de predicados causativos. De los ejemplos documentados de poena afficere en un amplio corpus de textos, intentaremos destacar las principales características de este tipo de colocación. Para su descripción y formalización nos serviremos del marco teórico propuesto por la Teoría Sentido-Texto.

VR (resultative verb) 1 constructions are most generally treated as compounds or verbs plus complements by Chinese linguists. In this paper, I would like to question the validity of this analysis with reference to the example of Taiwanese VR constructions, and propose and justify an alternative analysis within the lexicase dependency framework. A Taiwanese VR construction is a single word, and not a compound, which is different from the traditional analysis that views a VR as a compound composed of two verbs. In this paper I claim that a Taiwanese VR is in fact a single word composed of a verb and a derivational suffix. It has been claimed that differences in the distribution of the object of VR forms depends on whether the object is definite or not. For example, an indefinite object has to be positioned after the VR construction (i.e., VR + O). The distribution of the objects is claimed to be more flexible if they are definite (e.g., O + VR). However, in this paper I would like to account for this phenomenon purely in terms of the transitivity of the resultative verbs. The transitive VR constructions take the nouns that follow them as their dependents and assign accusative case form to them. If the dependent object comes before the VR construction, a so-called disposal marker kā is required; otherwise, no accusative case form will be assigned, and the sentence will be ill-formed. Intransitive VR constructions cannot have their dependents following them simply because no accusative case form can be assigned to them. * I would like to dedicate this paper to Professor Stanley Starosta (1939-2002), in memory of a unique linguist, from whom I learned the lexicase grammar. 1 Some Chinese linguists call it RVC (resultative verb compound), but VR is most commonly used due to the order of the two components.

In this paper, we discuss the syntax of a causative construction in European Portuguese, which is similar to the ordinary causative (OC) but which also differs from it in important ways. We refer to this construction as the Locative Causative (LC) construction, which alternates between transitive (TLC) and intransitive (ILC) variants. We show that LCs entail a change of location of the theme and exhibit an existence presupposition on the theme. We suggest that this is because the entire VoiceP is embedded in a LocP structure, and that this structure also leads to the existence presupposition. We propose that both TLCs and ILCs may embed a passive VoiceP despite having infinitival morphology, and that the distinction between light verbs ‘go’ in ILCs and ‘put’ in TLCs stems from the presence or absence of an externalargument-introducing Voice head in the matrix clause. This working paper is available in University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: https://repository.upenn...

In this paper, we discuss the syntax of a causative construction in European Portuguese, which is similar to the ordinary causative (OC) but which also differs from it in important ways. We refer to this construction as the Locative Causative (LC) construction, which alternates between transitive (TLC) and intransitive (ILC) variants. We show that LCs entail a change of location of the theme and exhibit an existence presupposition on the theme. We suggest that this is because the entire VoiceP is embedded in a LocP structure, and that this structure also leads to the existence presupposition. We propose that both TLCs and ILCs may embed a passive VoiceP despite having infinitival morphology, and that the distinction between light verbs ‘go’ in ILCs and ‘put’ in TLCs stems from the presence or absence of an externalargument-introducing Voice head in the matrix clause. This working paper is available in University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: https://repository.upenn...

This paper is concerned with the linking of arguments to syntax in Chinese resultative verb constructions. It is demonstrated that the linking principles based on event roles can account for the complementary distribution of the Ba-construction and the Verb-copying construction, because 'ba+NP' is associated only with the Locus of affect role (an entity that is involved in the endpoint), whereas 'a copied verb+NP' is associated only with the Target of activity role (an entity that undergoes the action). It is predicted that a resultative verb construction, which can occur in the Ba-construction, can have a corresponding Bei-construction, because both constructions involve the displacement of the Locus of affect role.

Typology study of Ciacia language (CL) in various linguistic aspects has not been conducted yet. It is the first study that focus on syntactic typology. Ciacia language is one of local languages in Buton Regency, Southeast Sulawesi Province. The study focuses on five main problems, they are (1) How is the base construction of verbal clause in CL? (2) How are the predicate and structure argument constructions of verbal clause in CL, (3) How are the simple predicate and complex predicate constructions of verbal clause in CL? (4) How are valency and valency change mechanism of verbal clause construction in CL? (5) How are complex sentence construction and  grammatical alliance system?. The oral data of this study is obtained through recording and elicitation techniques. Written data is obtained through the previous studies. The study also used synthetic data which is verrified by the informants. The data was analyzed by apportion (distributional) method.             The investigation o...

The article discusses ways of expressing causation in Modern English. Causation finds its grammatical expression in nearly all languages though the ways of its expression may vary. Causation is one of the ways of causing which expresses coercion through force. Modern English abounds in syntactic, morphological and lexical ways of expressing causation.

This paper seeks to highlight novel differences between direct and indirect causatives in Hindi-Urdu with respect to ‘optional’ -se phrases and ‘causer’ subjects. As opposed to the singular instrument -se phrase in the case of direct causatives, indirect causatives allow multiple -se phrases two instruments and an intermediate agent. While the licensing of the intermediate agent -se phrase in indirect causatives has been the cornerstone of various theoretical accounts of Hindi-Urdu causatives (Kachru 1980, Saksena 1982, Bhatt & Embick 2003, Ramchand 2008, 2010 & Richa 2011 among others), the additional instrument -se phrase in indirect causatives has not been discussed in detail hitherto. In this paper I demonstrate that this observation regarding instruments can be best accounted for under a conceptualization of indirect causation as being structurally and semantically more complex than the direct causative. In particular, it is the bi-eventiveness of indirect causation, as opposed...

In this paper, a frame-based description of verbal polysemy is used to answer some questions concerning syntactic behavior and argument structures associated with complex predicates in Persian. In Persian a number of CPs consisting of a light verb (LV) and a preverb (PV) participate in causative alternation. The causative variant is formed with the LV ændaxtæn 'cause to fall' and the anti-causative variant is formed with oftadæn 'fall'. In some contexts these verbs do not participate in causative alternatioin. In other words they do not have an anti-causative variant in such contexts. The peculiar behavior of these verbs in different contexts is explained in the framework of Frame Semantics [2]. I will argue that these verbs are associated with two semantic frames and just one of them is compatible with both causative and antiicausative form. The other frame is compatible with causative form but incompatibel with anticausative form hence no anticausative variant. As ...

Previous studies on the Chinese progressive mainly focus on the distinctions between Chinese progressive zai and the continuous-zhe, but few has noticed that the progressive zai is sensitive to the plurality of the event encoded by the predicate in its scope. Inspired by the observations of the selectional constraints of the English progressive, this paper aims to find out the selectional constraints of Chinese progressive zai. It is argued that Chinese progressive zai requires its modified predicates to denote singular durative events as its English counterpart do. Given that no studies have illustrated the semantic criterion for identifying predicates denoting singular events in Mandarin, this study proposes that singular telic (incremental) predicates compatible with zai are those with singular atoms or singular groups as the incremental themes and singular atelic predicates co-occurring with zai are those being incremental homogeneous. An incremental accomplishment with a singular atom as the theme is expressed by the combination of an incremental verb and a quantized incremental object with the cardinal numeral quantifier yi 'one' as the measure phrase, while that with a singular group as the theme is expressed by the combination of an incremental verb and a definite object modified by the definite determiner like na 'that/those'. In contrast, incremental homogeneous predicates are expressed by activities or plural achievements.