Chinese Secondary Predicate Construction Revisited

This thesis is dedicated to the study of secondary predicate construction in Chinese. We will mainly discuss its syntactic structure and licensing conditions from a new perspective. First, we investigate the syntactic representation of resultative secondary predicate construction in Chinese; second, we examine licensing conditions on secondary predicates in Chinese, in particular, based on the distinct distribution of property and descriptive secondary predicates. We will investigate different licensing conditions on different secondary predicates and provide an account for this.In response to the first issue, in view of various syntactic tests and Lim’s (2006) researches on secondary predicate construction in Chinese, we will argue that the internal structure of resultative secondary predicate construction in Chinese depends on the nature of the secondary subject; and according to the selectedness of the secondary subject, the internal structure of resultatives can be sorted as control construction and small clause construction. With reference to researches done by Li (1998), Zhang (2001), and Gu&Pan (2001), we propose five diagnoses to justify that the absence/presence of selectedness between the secondary subject and the primary predicate will result in the different syntactic structures. These diagnoses are:a) Lian-"Dou Construction, Focus with Zhiyou’only’, b) Mei…Dou’every…all’ Quantification, c) Extraction of the Second NP, d) Verb-copying Construction and e) Optionality of the Secondary Predicate.Concerning the second issue, i.e., the study of licensing conditions on secondary predicates, we will mainly investigate the occurrence of descriptive adjectives and property adjectives in secondary predicate positions. We find that both descriptive adjectives and property adjectives are allowed in secondary predicate positions in Chinese. After elaborating the correspondence between property/descriptive adjectives and individual/stage-level predicates, we come to the conclusion that secondary predicate positions can be occupied not only by stage-level predicates but also by individual-level predicates, contrary to previous proposals that only stage-level predicates can serve as secondary predicates. In addition, based on the fact that property and descriptive adjectives can only occur in particular positions and that they are in complementary distribution, we will further discuss their different licensing conditions. With reference to Yang’s (2010) study on the complementary distribution of property and descriptive adjectives and Tense Hypothesis proposed by Stowell (1982), we will try to provide an account for the complementary distribution.