Cover not available
Part of
New Explorations in Chinese Theoretical Syntax: Studies in honor of Yen-Hui Audrey Li
Edited by Andrew Simpson
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 272] 2022
► pp. 111–132

“Descriptive complements” are manner adverbials

| University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Dartmouth College

The Mandarin “descriptive complement” construction (e.g. Ta pao-de kuai “S/he runs fast”) is often analyzed as a verb plus a syntactic complement, but I argue that the postverbal de-phrase is in fact a manner adverbial. Several facts about the construction, including morphological and cooccurrence restrictions, do not help decide the issue. Rather, two strong arguments support its adjunct status. First, taking these phrases as complements would require all Mandarin verbs to optionally select for a manner expression, a dubious proposition. Second, doing so would violate a widely-assumed universal restriction on argument structure (to at most three arguments). Finally, several putative arguments for complement status are shown to be either invalid (such as the possibility of extraction) or weak (postverbal position).

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The descriptive construction
    • 1.2Two types of choice for an analysis
    • 1.3Organization
  • 2.Equivocal evidence
  • 3.(Potentially) deciding evidence
    • 3.1Selection
    • 3.2Argument structure
  • 4.Two non-arguments for the Complement Hypothesis
    • 4.1Extraction from DES
    • 4.2Postverbal position
  • 5.Summary and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 April 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.272.04ern
References (44)
Abeillé, Anne, and Daniele Godard
2001 A Class of ‘Lite’ Adverbs in French. In Joaquin Camps et al.. (eds), Romance Syntax, Semantics and L2 Acquisition, 9–25. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, Mark
1988 Incorporation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Borgonovo, Claudia., and Ad Neeleman
2000 Transparent Adjuncts. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique, 45:199–224. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chao, Yuen-Ren
1948 Mandarin Primer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cheng, Lisa L.-S
2007 Verb Copying in Mandarin Chinese. In The Copy Theory of Movement, Norbert Corver and Jairo Nunes (eds.), 151–174. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cinque, Guglielmo
1999 Adverbs and Functional Heads. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Ernst, Thomas
1995 Negation in Mandarin Chinese. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 13:665–707. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002 The Syntax of Adjuncts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
2003 Adjuncts and Word Order Typology in East Asian Languages. In Functional Structure(s), Form and Interpretation, Audrey Li and Andrew Simpson (eds.), 241–261. London: RoutledgeCurzon.Google Scholar
2014a Adverbial Adjuncts in Mandarin Chinese. In The Handbook of Chinese Linguistics, C.-T. James Huang, Y.-H. Audrey Li, and Andrew Simpson (eds.), 49–72. Malden, MA: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014b The Syntax of Adverbs. In Routledge Handbook of Syntax, A. Carnie, Y. Sato, and D. Sadiqqi (eds.), 108–130. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
2022 Adjunct Condition and the Nature of Adjuncts. The Linguistic Review 39:1.
Geuder, Wilhelm
2000 Oriented Adverbs: Issues in the Lexical Semantics of Event Adverbs. Ph.D. dissertation, Universität Konstanz.
Gouguet, Jules
2006 Adverbials and Mandarin Argument Structure. In Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 6, Oliver Bonami and Patricia Cabredo Hofherr (eds.), 155–173. Paris: Colloque de Syntaxe et Semantique de Paris.Google Scholar
Hale, Kenneth, and Samuel Jay Keyser
1993 On Argument Structure and the Lexical Expression on Syntactic Relations. In The View from Building 20, Kenneth Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser (eds.), 53–109. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Harley, Heidi
2011 A Minimalist Approach to Argument Structure. In The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism, Cedric Boeckx (ed.), 426–447. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P., and Eva F. Schultze-Berndt
2005 Issues in the Syntax and Semantics of Participant-Oriented Adjuncts: an Introduction. In Secondary Predication and Adverbial Modification, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann and Eva F.Schultze-Berndt (eds.), 1–68. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Huang, C.-T. James
1982 Logical Relations in Chinese and the Theory of Grammar. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.
1988  Wo pao de kuai and Chinese Phrase Structure. Language 64:274–311.Google Scholar
1992 Complex Predicates in Control. In Control and Grammar, Richard K. Larson, Sabine Iatridou, Utpal Lahiri and James Higginbotham (eds.), 109–147. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Huang, C.-T. James, Audrey, Li Y.-H., and Yafei, Li
2009 Syntax of Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Huang, Chu-ren, and Mangione, Louis
1985 A Reanalysis of de: Adjuncts and Subordinate Clauses. In WCCFL 4, Jeffrey Goldberg, Susannah MacKaye and Michael Westcoat (eds.), Stanford: CSLI.Google Scholar
Kayne, Ricard
1994 The Antisymmetry of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kubota, Ai
2015 Transforming Manner Adverbs into Surface-Subject-Oriented Adverbs: Evidence from Japanese. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 33:1019–1046. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Law, Paul
2006 Adverbs in A-not-A Questions in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 15:97–136. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Li, Audrey Y.-H
1990 Order and Constituency in Mandarin Chinese. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Liao, Wei-wen Roger, and Tzong-hong Jonah Lin
2019 Syntactic Structures of Mandarin Purposives. Linguistics 57:87–126. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lin, T.-Z. Jonah
2014 Light Verbs. In The Handbook of Chinese Linguistics, C.-T. James Huang, Y.-H., Audrey Li, and Andrew Simpson (eds.), 73–99. Malden, MA: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marantz, Alec
1984 On the Nature of Grammatical Relations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
McGinnis, Martha
2017 Applicatives. In Blackwell Companion to Syntax, 2nd ed., Martin Everaert and Henk van Riemsdijk (eds.). Malden, MA: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mei, Kuang
1972 Studies in the Transformational Grammar of Modern Chinese. Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Morzycki, Marcin
2016 Modification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pinon, Christopher
2013 Speech Act Adverbs as Manner Adverbs. MS, Universite Lille 3. [URL]
Ramchand, Gillian
2008 Verb Meaning and the Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018 Situations and Syntactic Structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rapoport, Tova
2019 Secondary Predication. In Oxford Handbook of Event Structure, Robert Truswell (ed.), 426–455. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rothstein, Susan
2006 Secondary Predication. In Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Martin Everaert and Henk van Riemsdijk (eds.), Vol. 4, 209–233. Malden, MA: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schäfer, Martin
2008 Resolving Scope in Manner Modification. In Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 7, Oliver Bonami and P. Cabredo Hofherr (eds.), 351–372. Paris: CSSP.Google Scholar
Soh, Hooi Ling
1998 Object Scrambling in Chinese. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.
Tang, C.-C. Jane
1990 Chinese Phrase Structure and the Extended X’ Theory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University dissertation.Google Scholar
Truswell, Robert
2011 Events, Phrases, and Questions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tsai, Cheng-Yu Edwin
2012 Descriptive Complement Constructions as Concealed Pseudoclefts in Chinese. In Proceedings of the 29th West Coast Conference on Linguistics, Jaehoon Choi et al.. (eds.), 259–267. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
Zhang, Niina
2003 The Asymmetry between Depictives and Resultatives in Chinese. In Asymmetry in Grammar, Anna Maria DiSciullo (ed.) Vol. 1, 165–185. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2020 Low Predicate Inversion in Mandarin. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 29:159–207. DOI logoGoogle Scholar