Edited by Andrew Simpson
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 272] 2022
► pp. 111–132
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).