Paper 3827
Improper Verb Doubling in Mandarin Chinese and the Williams Cycle
Tom Meadows and Qiuhao Charles Yan
240-249 (complete paper or proceedings contents)
Tom Meadows and Qiuhao Charles Yan
240-249 (complete paper or proceedings contents)
Abstract
Within Mandarin Chinese root clauses, verb doubling effects are attested in either a clause-medial or clause-initial position (Lai 2021, Meadows & Yan 2023, to appear, a.o.). We treat this contrast as VP-fronting to a lower or higher position in the clausal spine. Crucially, we show in this paper that cross-clausal VP-fronting to the lower, clause-medial position is only possible out of a limited class of complement clauses, unlike VP-fronting to the clausal periphery. We offer an approach to such movement restrictions based on the Williams Cycle (Meadows 2024, Poole 2022, Williams 2003, 2011), and predictions about VP-fronting across multiple levels of embedding.
Published in
Proceedings of the 42nd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Shweta Akolkar, Amber Galvano, Akil Ismael, Kang Franco Liu, and Line Mikkelsen
Table of contents
edited by Shweta Akolkar, Amber Galvano, Akil Ismael, Kang Franco Liu, and Line Mikkelsen
Table of contents