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Current Issues in Syntactic Cartography: A crosslinguistic perspective
Edited by Fuzhen Si and Luigi Rizzi
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 267] 2021
► pp. 217–242

Chapter 10
Towards a cartography of light verbs

| Beijing Language and Culture University

A common goal shared by cartographic studies is “to draw maps as precise and detailed as possible of syntactic configurations” (Cinque & Rizzi 2008). In the past two decades, a great progress has been made in the study of peripheries of different domains such as CP domain, VP domain and DP domain. The “more precise and detailed” cartographic research goal enables us to rethink those projections which believed to be single projections in earlier theoretical models. A rich literature on peripheries have shown that many of these superficial single projections are actually abbreviations of much richer structural zones. For instance, the C layer is split into Topic and Focus components (Rizzi 1997; Rizzi & Bocci 2017) and Topic and Focus themselves are also conceived as Topic “field” and Focus “field” (Benincà & Poletto 2004), encoding different and hierarchically arranged topic elements or focus elements. Similarly, this chapter suggests that “light verb” can also be further analyzed as a “light verb field”, containing several layers of different light verbs, conveying different information. Following this tradition, also in light of Larson (1988, 2014), Harley (2002), and Benincà & Poletto (2004), the present chapter provides a zoom-in/zoom-out mental magnifier for the study of various light verb structures. One major assumption and two subsequent assumptions are proposed: (1) Split light verb hypothesis: from a cartographic point of view, the light verb “v” is not “ONE” head, but an umbrella name of a rather “rich structural” zone, call it “light verb field” or “light verb zone”. (2) About the argument structure, it is proposed that in the complex light verb constructions, the core of the predicate is not composed of one single argument structure, but a chain of several argument structures. (3) Correspondingly, the event structure can also be looked at in more details in these structures: the idea is that in the sentences contain chain argument structures, the event can also be analyzed as a chain of event fragments, following rule-to-rule correspondence principle.

Keywords: split light verb hypothesis, chain argument structures, chain event structures, ‘zoom-in/zoom out’, mental magnifier, light verb field, rule-to-rule correspondence principle
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.About the term “light verb”
    • 2.1LVNs vs. LVBs
    • 2.2Characteristics of “light verb” in Jespersenian sense
    • 2.3Huang’s light verb analysis in Chinese
  • 3.Internal configuration of light verb structures
    • 3.1Observation step 1: Simplex Light Verb Shell Structures
    • 3.2Observation step 2: Complex Light Verb Shell Structures
  • 4.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.267.10si
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