A Syntactic Study Of Verb Reduplication In Mandarin Chinese

Reduplication,which is acknowledged to exist extensively in many languages,has long been regarded as a morphological process.This thesis,however,takes a syntactic view of the reduplication phenomenon.Specifically,the author provides a generative syntactic investigation of verb reduplication in Mandarin Chinese,which is classified into four types: AA type(including ABAB),A-le-A type,A-yi-A type and AABB type.In this thesis,the generative mechanism of Chinese verb reduplication is discussed,and the selectional constraints of Chinese verb reduplication are also explained.It is found in this study that events expressed by reduplicated verb forms are telic in time.The delimitative meaning is thus held as the basic grammatical meaning of Chinese reduplicated verb forms,and the delimitative aspect is argued to be a kind of inner aspect in this study.It is put forward that an affixal morpheme occupies the head of the inner aspect,which triggers the verb to raise to its position from a lower position of the head of VP.Based on the analysis of the derivational process of Chinese verb reduplication,the selectional constraints are also clarified,including the constraints on co-occurring with such quantificational constituents as liang ge wenti ‘two questions’,with Chinese aspect markers,and with time adverbials denoting long time.It is hoped that this study could enrich studies on Chinese verb reduplication and could provide help for the understanding of reduplication of other categories.