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Article published In: Sound, Form, and Meaning of Chinese Dialects
Edited by Ik-sang Eom
[Language and Linguistics 20:1] 2019
► pp. 85–130

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Semantic constraint on preposition incorporation of postverbal locative PPs in Mandarin Chinese

 | Hanyang University
 | Nanyang Technological University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 2 January 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.00030.pec
Abstract
Other than subcategorized argument locative PPs (e.g. 放在桌子上 fàng zài zhuōzi-shàng ‘put on the table’), the postverbal position in Modern Mandarin Chinese can only be filled by limited types of adjunct locative prepositional phrases (e.g. 跳在桌子上 tiào zài zhuōzi-shàng ‘jump onto the table’). Among these postverbal adjunct locative PPs, only a small set of PPs permits the incorporation of the preposition into the preceding verb to form a V-P compound (“preposition incorporation”), yielding their previous prepositional object to surface as the object of the compound verb V-P. Previous studies claim that adjunct phrases which quantize an event, such as event delimiters, may behave like arguments (“the delimiter hypothesis”). Yet, our observations find that adjunct locative PPs that are not event delimiters (e.g. directional 向 xiàng/往 wǎng ‘toward’ PPs or non-directional 在 zài ‘at’ PPs) can also allow their prepositional object to appear as the verbal object. This thus calls for a modification of the widely-accepted delimiter hypothesis. We argue that the semantic characterization of the postverbal locative PPs permitting PI can be generalized as being associated with the denotation of a scalar result. Specifically, we understand result from the perspective of scale structure proposed in recent studies and argue that in addition to delimiting an event (that is, introducing a closed scale to the event from the scalar perspective), such PPs can also either add directional information (an open scale) to the event that they modify, or further specify scalar information for the event denoted by the VP. This work not only provides a unified analysis of most types of preposition incorporation that involve the postverbal locative PPs in Mandarin Chinese, but is also the first study that provides a comprehensive analysis of the scalar properties and functions of Chinese locative PPs. Our findings from the Chinese data will also contribute to the cross-linguistic semantic generalization of internal adjuncts and the domain of extended direct case assignment.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Background: Locative NPs appearing as the object of V-P compound and the delimiter hypothesis
    • 1.2Research question and hypothesis
  • 2.Scale and the scalar property of PPs
    • 2.1The notion of scale
    • 2.2Scalar attributes of PPs and their aspectual functions in event composition
      • 2.2.1Bounded PPs: Closed scalar PPs
      • 2.2.2Unbounded PPs: Nonscalar PPs and open scalar PPs
        • 2.2.2.1Nonscalar PPs
        • 2.2.2.2Open scalar PPs
  • 3.Locative PPs introducing a closed scale
  • 4.Locative PPs introducing an open scale
  • 5.Locative PPs further elaborating a scale
    • 5.1Only scale-denoting VPs allow the PI of the postverbal 在 zài PPs
      • Two-point closed scalar verbs
      • Incremental theme verb phrases
      • Open scalar verbs
      • Atypical manner-of-motion verbs
    • 5.2The external modification by preverbal 在 zài PPs and the internal modification by postverbal 在 zài PPs for scalar change VPs
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Sources
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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