The Syntax Of The Flip-flop Construction In Mandarin Chinese

The main focus of The main focus of this study is on the flip-flop (FF) construction,a term for pairs of sentences in Mandarin Chinese, such as wu ge ren chi le yi guo fan(five people ate one pot of rice)(henceforth called the FFA pattern) and yi guo fan chi lewu ge ren (one pot of rice was supplied to five people to eat)(henceforth called the FFBpattern), where the sentence-initial nominal phrase in FFA is at the sentence-final positionin FFB, and vice versa.FF constructions exhibit various intriguing properties and have attracted muchattention in the study of Chinese grammar. Previous analyses of FF constructions assumethat there is a derivational relationship between the FFA and FFB patterns. In both cases,the preverbal nominal expression is an argument functioning as the subject and thepostverbal nominal expression an argument functioning as the object. In this sense, theFFA pattern and the FFB pattern are simply sentences with inverse argument word order.It follows that the FFA pattern can be regarded as derived by switching the syntacticposition of the subject argument and object argument of the corresponding FFB pattern;conversely, the FFB pattern can be seen as derived by switching the syntactic position ofthe subject argument and object argument of the FFA pattern. If this analysis is on theright track, Chinese FF constructions will pose serious challenges to a number ofimportant well-established principles and theories of Universal Grammar, including theTheta Theory, the Case Theory, and the Binding Theory.The primary goal of the present thesis is to show that FF constructions in MandarinChinese are not real counterexamples of the well-established principles and theories ofUniversal Grammar. Departing from the stereotypical one-verb analysis, we propose a novel two-verb analysis, under which the predicate verb in the FFA pattern withcanonical transitive verbs, whereas the verb in the FFB pattern with intransitive copularverbs like measure, cost, and weigh in English, which are unaccusative in nature. Giventhis assumption, all the important semantic and syntactic differences between the FFApattern and its FFB counterpart can be accounted for in a straightforward fashion. As atypical transitive verb, the verb in an FFA pattern takes an agent as its external argumentand a patient/theme/location as its internal argument. It denotes an activity, allowsmodification of agent-oriented modifiers, and can be passivized. In contrast, the verb inan FFB pattern, by virtue of being copular and unaccusative, takes the preverbal nominalbearing the theta role of patient/theme/location as its internal argument, and thepostverbal nominal as its predicative complement. The verb describes a state, allows nomodification of agent-oriented modifiers, and cannot be passivized.It is shown that there are both theoretical and empirical reasons for rejecting thelong-standing assumption that FFA and FFB patterns are derivationally related. Crucially,neither the assumed movement of the subject argument into the postverbal object positionnor the movement of the object argument into the preverbal subject position is wellmotivated.In an alternative approach within Chomsky’s phase-based theory of syntax, wepropose two distinct syntactic derivations for FFA and FFB patterns. Specifically, in thecase of the FFA pattern, the transitive verb is merged with its nominal argumentcomplement to form a VP. This VP structure is then merged as the complement of anabstract transitive light verb v, which is a strong affix and attracts the verb to adjoin to it.The resulting v-bar structure is then merged with an argument which is assigned the thetarole of agent to form the complex vP. Subsequently, the vP merges with the T constituent,and the agent argument agrees (invisibly) with T and raises into Spec-TP. In an FFBpattern, the intransitive copular verb first merges with a predicative nominal complementto form a V-bar structure, which is then merged with an internal argument as specifier to form a VP. The resulting VP is merged with an intransitive light verb v with no externalargument, and this strong affixal v attracts the verb to attach to it, forming a vP. Theresulting vP structure is subsequently merged with a T constituent. This serves as a probeand locates the nominal argument of the VP as a goal which is active by virtue of itsunvalued Case feature. T agrees (invisibly) with, assigns (invisible) nominative Case toand attracts the argument to move to Spec-TP. On this account, the postverbal nominal inthe FFB pattern, being a predicative complement of the verb, is exempt from Caserequirement of a nominal argument.