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In:Current Issues in Syntactic Cartography: A crosslinguistic perspective
Edited by Fuzhen Si and Luigi Rizzi
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 267] 2021
► pp. 287–322

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Chapter 13
On the syntactic representation of Chinese you (有) in “you + VP” construction

 | University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
Published online: 12 October 2021
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.267.13li
Abstract
This paper aims at drawing the syntactic maps of you(有 lit. have) in “you + VP” construction in Chinese within the cartographic framework (Rizzi 1997; Cinque 1999, and much subsequent work) and splitting IP on the basis of Huang (1988). More precisely, a syntax-semantic mismatch of you is observed in the literature, namely, previous studies claim that you can convey several semantic readings, for instance, past tense, future tense, perfective, as well as (emphatic) affirmative reading; its syntactic representation, however, is put under the syntactic node of I/T (Huang 1988, etc.). This paper first verifies the features on you and then offers a cartographic account to this mismatch. The results show that you only conveys the perfective feature and the (emphatic) affirmative feature, and it is spelled out at the phrasal lever under AffP. Besides, a You-Support Hypothesis in Chinese is suggested.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous studies on “you + VP” construction
  • 3.A syntax-semantic mismatch of you
  • 4.Verification of the features on you
  • 5.A cartographic attempt: The licensing of you
    • 5.1A synthetic viewpoint
    • 5.2A syntactic analysis
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
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