Imperfective aspectzhe, agent deletion, and locative inversion in Mandarin Chinese
✍ Scribed by Haihua Pan
- Book ID
- 104635160
- Publisher
- Springer Netherlands
- Year
- 1996
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 966 KB
- Volume
- 14
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0167-806X
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
In this article I argue that not all the verbs that undergo locative inversion in Mandarin Chinese are intrinsically unaccusative as assumed in the literature. The fact that some transitive non-passivized verbs can undergo locative inversion is argued to be the result of morphological operations rather than the result of transitive alternation (cf. Cheng 1989). One such operation -that involving the morpheme zhe -is described here; I claim that it deletes the agent role of a verb if certain conditions are met, and allows the verb in question to satisfy the conditions on locative inversion (Bresnan and Kanerva 1989). I also argue that the zhe operation is not a variant of the passive operation, but a morphological operation in its own right. * I appreciate the opportunities of presenting part of this article at the 25th International Sino-Tibetan Conference on Linguistics and Literature at Berkeley and the Linguistics Colloquium at the Department of Linguistics of the University of Texas at Austin in 1992. I would like to thank all the participants for comments, especially C. L. Baker, I. Comorovski, K.