Ditransitives in Mandarin Chinese

초록

This paper is an investigation of four types of ditransitive constructions in Mandarin Chinese. Although there is a wealth of descriptive literature on ditransitives in Chinese there has been very little generative work on this topic. Previous research has not addressed binding effects, word order, and Case licensing in one analysis, which we attempt here. Our analysis is in the framework of Newman ‘s (2024) theory of argument selectioin. Crucial to our analysis is the claim that the Mandarin form gěi (‘give’) is consistently a verb, even though it sometimes introduces an indirect object (akin to the preposition to in English). Thus, in some cases, the indirect object appears in its own vP (rather than a PP as expected in English). We derive the differences in binding, word order, and Case licensing between English and Mandarin based on this difference.

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