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Article published In:
Concentric
Vol. 45:2 (2019) ► pp.141–166

On locative alternation verbs in Mandarin Chinese

| National Chiayi University

This paper focuses on both single and compound locative alternation verbs in Mandarin Chinese. First, three particular properties of locative alternation verbs are introduced and compared cross-linguistically with examples from Japanese and English. Next, three properties are explored further and possible explanations are provided for the observed similarities and differences between the languages. Finally, the syntactic patterns of locative alternation verbs in Mandarin Chinese are investigated in the Sinica Corpus. The results show that the “oblique argument-verb-accusative argument” sentence pattern has the highest percentage of appearance. This finding echoes Lin’s (2008) claim that Chinese is not only a “topic prominent” language, but also a “locative prominent” language.

Keywords: locative alternation, motion, change of state, affectedness, locative subject
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Some properties of Chinese locative alternation and a cross-linguistic comparison
  • 3.The discussion
    • 3.1Affectedness
    • 3.2Argument drop
    • 3.3The summary
  • 4.Further investigation
    • 4.1The syntactic patterns available
    • 4.2The corpus study
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/consl.00006.kuo
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