Rethinking postverbal ‘acquire’ and related constructions in Cantonese
Polyfunctionality and parameters
This paper revisits a well-established areal phenomenon in Mainland Southeast Asia and Northern Europe involving
an element, ACQ(UIRE), that functions as a lexical verb meaning ‘to get or acquire’ and appears, as a functional item, in
numerous seemingly unrelated constructions such as modal constructions, resultatives, descriptive complementation, and focus
constructions. This paper presents a generative framework for the postverbal ACQ-structures in Hong Kong Cantonese
involving the marker dak1. The proposed framework takes into account four readings of postverbal
ACQ-sentences, namely potential, permission, descriptive, and focus, and argues that all postverbal
ACQ-structures in Cantonese share the same basic configuration in which the ACQ heads a
vP-internal ModP which expresses possibility modality and selects a small clause XP. The postverbal ACQ
takes an AspP as complement which indicates the (non-)realization of the projected endpoint. The interpretational difference and
other structural variations are boiled down to the three parameters realized in featural terms as: [±Realised] on Asp0,
[±Possibility] and [±Deontic] on Mod0. The analysis also provides an explanation for several long-standing issues,
including the verb-copying phenomenon, the co-occurrence of dak1 with the modal auxiliary
ho2ji5, the distribution of the A-not-A form and negation, and the across-the-board aspectual incompatibility in
postverbal ACQ-structures. The parametric framework demonstrates how apparently unrelated ACQ-constructions are
closely connected with each other and provide a testable model to account for cross-linguistic variation found in other
ACQ languages.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Previous literature on Cantonese postverbal ACQ-sentences
- 2.1The modal readings
- 2.2The non-modal readings
- 3.The core proposal
- 3.1The postverbal ACQ structure: A unification
- 3.2Deriving the modal reading: [−Realised] [+Possibility]
- 3.2.1Deriving a potential reading
- 3.2.2Deriving a permission reading
- 3.2.3Why ambiguous?
- 3.2.4Modal concord
- 3.3Deriving the descriptive reading: [+Realised] [+Possibility]
- 3.3.1Descriptive-potential ambiguity is achievement-ability implicature
- 3.3.2What is the AP describing?
- 3.3.2.1A discourse salient object
- 3.3.2.2The definiteness constraint
- 3.3.2.3Manner vs. result modification
- 3.3.3Why is ACQ obligatory?
- 4.Further application of the proposed analysis
- 4.1Across-the-board aspectual incompatibility in postverbal ACQ-sentences
- 4.2Linearization and morphological status of postverbal ACQ
- 4.3Postverbal ACQ and focus
- 4.3.1Cantonese postverbal dak1 as focus operator?
- 4.3.2Other related focus phenomena: A-not-A formation and negation scope
- 5.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Abbreviations
-
References
References (92)
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