As mentioned in the beginning of the paper, the part-of-speech of Mandarin ba has also been a contentious issue in Chinese linguistics. However, Bender (2000) and D. Li (2003) both argue, convincingly, that it is a verb, not a preposition. They demonstrate that ba is a three-place predicate that subcategorizes for a subject, an object, and a VP complement. The similarity between her analysis of ba and our analysis of bei is obvious. Thus, between ba and bei, the subject and the object are inverted, as shown in (60). Unlike ba, bei allows the agent NP to be optional.
(60) a. Ta ba juzi bo-le pi.
he BA orange peel-PERF peel(n) ‘He peeled the orange.’
b. Juzi bei (ta) bo-le pi.
orange BEI he peel-PERF peel(n) ‘The orange was peeled (by him).’
Bender (2000: 127) formally renders the lexical entry of ba in (61) within the grammatical framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), and the ba’s semantics is informally given in (80). Under this analysis, (60a) has the c-structure and f-structure given in (63a-b).
(61) ba V
(↑ PRED) = ‘ba <(↑ SUBJ)(↑ OBJ)(↑ XCOMP)>’53 (↑ OBJ) = (↑ XCOMP TOPIC)
(62) (↑ SUBJ) is responsible for the fact that (↑ OBJ) turns out as (↑ XCOMP) describes.
(63) Ta ba juzi bo-le pi.
he BA orange peel-PERF peel(n) a. c-structure54
IP
NP VP
Ta V NP VP ba juzi V NP
bo-le pi
53 Bender (2000) uses the function COMP. I modify it to be XCOMP, which is more in line with the LFG conventions.
54 Note that LFG c-structures are annotated with functional equations, which link the c-structure and the f-structure. For the sake of simplicity, such annotations are not included.
b. f-structure55
PRED ‘ba <(↑SUBJ) (↑OBJ) (↑XCOMP)>’
OBJ [‘orange’]
SUBJ [‘3sg’]
TOPIC
XCOMP PRED ‘peel <(↑SUBJ) (↑OBJ)>’
SUBJ [….]
OBJ [‘peel’]
An important feature of Bender’s account is that ba, unlike other pivotal verbs, does not have its object control the XCOMP’s SUBJ; instead, it controls its TOPIC, indicated by the curved line in the f-structure in (63b). In LFG, TOPIC is grammaticalized discourse function, subject to the Extended Coherence Condition (ECC) (Bresnan and Mchombo 1987: 8):
The extended coherence condition requires that all functions in f-structure be bound.
An argument function . . . is bound if it is the argument of a predicator (PRED). An adjunct is bound if it occurs in an f-structure containing a PRED. Finally, a topic or focus is bound whenever it is functionally identified with or anaphorically binds a bound function.
In the f-structure of (63b), the TOPIC in the complement clause, juzi ‘orange’, enters a possessor-possessed relation with OBJ in the local f-structure and thus anaphorically binds the latter, as indicated by the dotted line. This topic analysis of ba’s object also accounts for the unbounded nature of the gap, if any, in the embedded VP complement. Compare (64) and (65).
(64) Ta ba zhe jian shi jiao ren gaosu-le Lisi e.
he BA this CL matter ask someone tell-PERF Lee
‘He has asked someone to tell Lee about this matter.’
(65) Zhe jian shi bei ta jiao ren gaosu-le Lisi e.
this CL matter BEI he ask someone tell-PERF Lee
‘This matter has been “asked-someone-to-tell-Lee-about”.’
In (64), the TOPIC of the embedded clause, which is controlled by ba’s object, zhe jian shi ‘this matter’, enters into a long-distance control relation with the (empty) object of the final embedded clause. The ba sentence in (64) finds its bei counterpart in (65), where the matrix subject likewise enters a long-distance control relation with the same object. According to Tsao (1986), a non-controversial topic in Chinese has the following properties.
55 Note that the f-structure information is also drastically simplified. For example, the matrix subject function should have a full set of attribute-value pairs indicating person, number, and PRED. The current ‘3sg’ and ‘orange’ (for the object function) is a ‘short-hand’ convention in the LFG literature.
(66) Topic properties (Tsao 1986: 4)
a. Topic invariably occupies the S-initial position of the first sentence in a topic chain.
b. Topic can optionally be separated from the rest of the sentence by one of the four pause particles: a (ya), na, me, and ba.
c. Topic is always definite or generic.
d. Topic is a discourse notion; it may, and often does, extend its semantic domain to more than one sentence.
e. Topic is in control of the pronominalization or deletion of all the coreferential NPs in a topic chain.
f. Topic, except in cases where it is also subject, plays no role in such processes as reflexivization, passivization, and Equi-NP deletion.
Thus, while LFG’s ECC can be taken to be a universal constraint, the possible relations listed in (66) can be seen as Mandarin-specific restrictions on the kind of adjuncts that are allowed to serve for the incorporation of the topic (Bender 2000:
128). According to Tsao (1986) and Bender (2000), the only properties that ba’s object NP does not have are the initial position and pause particles. Ba’s object corresponds to bei’s subject in our analysis, and note that the bei subject shares all six properties listed by Tsao, including the initial position and all pause particles.
Additionally, Tsao (1986) finds a close parallelism between pre-subject non-argument topics and the ba-NPs in the relations they enter with the comment clause, i.e., they allow virtually the same range of relations, including location, “relational” adverbials, possessor-possessed relation, and whole-part relation, precluding only time adverbials and class-member relationships. The following examples are Bender’s (2000: 125) adaptation from Tsao (1986: 17-19).
(67) Locative adverbial
Ta ba bilu sheng-le huo.
he BA fireplace build PERF fire ‘He built a fire in the fireplace.’
(68) “Relational” adverbial
Ta ba nei jian shi xie-le yi feng baogao.
he BA that CL matter write-PERF one CL report.
‘What he did with that matter was write a report about it.’
(69) Possessor-possessed
Ni neng bu neng ba nei ben shu jiang yidian jia?
you can not can BA that CL book lower a-little price
‘Can you reduce the price of that book a little?’
(70) Whole-part
Zhangsan ba wu ge pingguo chi-le san ge.
John BA five CL apple eat-PERF three CL
‘John ate three of the five apples.’
Note that exactly the same patterns are found in the bei construction, with the subject and object inverted, as shown in (71)-(74) below. To further emphasize the point that there is no significant distinction between the long passive and the short passive, again note that the bei object in all these examples can be left empty.
(71) Locative adverbial
Bilu bei (ta) sheng-le huo.
fireplace BEI he build PERF fire
‘What he did to the fireplace was build a fire in it.’
(72) “Relational” adverbial
Nei jian shi bei (ta) xie-le yi feng baogao.
that CL matter BEI he write-PERF one CL report.
‘What he did with that matter was write a report about it.’
(73) Possessor-possessed
Nei ben shu bei (ta) jiang-le yidian jia.
that CL book BEI he lower-PERF a-little price
‘What he did with the book was reduce its price a bit.’
(74) Whole-part
Wu ge pingguo bei (ta) chi-le san ge.
five CL apple BEI he eat-PERF three CL
‘What he did with the five apples was eat three of them.’
I will now give one final piece of evidence for the topic status of ba’s object and its bei counterpart. One interesting feature associated with the Mandarin word formation of V-lai-V-qu ‘V-come-V-go’, meaning to do something repeatedly, is that the compound is detransitivized even if the V is transitive; however, this suppressed internal argument, though barred from surfacing as the object, may appear as the topic as well as in the ba and bei constructions (Chang 2007).
(75) a.*Ta zhengtian jiang-lai-jiang-qu nei jian shi.
he whole-day talk-come-talk-go that CL matter b. Nei jian shi, ta zhengtian jiang-lai-jiang-qu.
that CL matter he whole-day talk-come-talk-go
‘That matter, he talks about all day long.’
c. Ta zhengtian jiang-lai-jiang-qu de nei jian shi he whole-day talk-come-talk-go DE that CL matter
‘The matter which he talks about all day long.’
(76) a. Ta ba nei jian shi zhengtian jiang-lai-jiang-qu.
he BA that CL matter whole-day talk-come-talk-go
‘What he does with that matter is talk about it all day long.’
b. Nei jian shi bei ta zhengtian jiang-lai-jiang-qu.
that CL matter BEI he whole-day talk-come-talk-go
‘That matter is talked about by him all day long.’
In (75b), the absorbed argument appears as the sentential topic, and it is relativized in (75c). Within LFG, a relativized element also takes on a topic function (e.g., Bresnan 2001: 183; Falk 2001: chp. 6). This topicalized NP is ba’s object, as in (76a), and bei’s subject, as in (76b). Bender’s analysis of ba-NP is thus taken to be correct and the same analysis is extended to bei’s subject.
However, Bender’s analysis of ba is incomplete in that it leaves the subject of the embedded clause unaccounted for. The f-structure in (63b) is repeated below in (77). An XCOMP’s SUBJ, by definition, must be functionally or anaphorically controlled. In (77), it is unclear how SUBJ in the embedded clause is fulfilled. This issue is left for future research in Bender (2000: 129).
(77) Ta ba juzi bo-le pi.
he BA orange peel-PERF peel(n)
PRED ‘ba <(↑SUBJ) (↑OBJ) (↑XCOMP)>’
OBJ [‘orange’]
SUBJ [‘3sg’]
TOPIC
XCOMP PRED ‘peel <(↑SUBJ) (↑OBJ)>’
SUBJ [….] ? OBJ [‘peel’]
The primary reason for Bender’s hesitation to have ba’s subject, the obvious choice, as the controller in (77) is because she argues, rather convincingly, that the simple transitive verbs in the embedded simplex clause are in fact unmarked passives.
These are the core cases of ba. Thus, in (78), the embedded verb chai ‘demolished’ is an unmarked passive, with its agent role suppressed from syntactic assignment and its subject fulfilled by an anaphoric relation with the TOPIC, fangzi ‘house’. The matrix subject thus cannot control the lower subject.
(78) Lısì ba na jian fangzi chai-le.
Lee BA that CL house demolish-PERF
‘Lee demolished that house.’
PRED ‘ba <(↑SUBJ) (↑OBJ) (↑XCOMP)>’
OBJ [‘house’]
SUBJ [‘Lee’]
TOPIC
XCOMP PRED ‘demolished <(↑SUBJ)>’
SUBJ [….]
However, even when ba’s subject does not always control the subject of the first embedded predicate, it is linked to the agent role of the embedded predicate, as
Bender (2000: 128) clearly recognizes. Thus, in (78), ba’s subject, Lee, is identified with the passive chai’s ‘demolished’ agent, which is nonetheless suppressed by passivization. This control relation is thus not realized syntactically. Accordingly, in (77), the matrix subject does indeed control the lower subject, which is linked to the agent role, of the active verb bo ‘peel’, as shown in (79).
(79) Ta ba juzi bo-le pi.
he BA orange peel-PERF peel(n)
PRED ‘ba <(↑SUBJ) (↑OBJ) (↑XCOMP)>’
OBJ [‘orange’]
SUBJ [‘3sg’]
TOPIC
XCOMP PRED ‘peel <(↑SUBJ) (↑OBJ)>’
SUBJ [….]
OBJ [‘peel’]
In fact, a more accurate generalization is that ba’s subject is always linked to the logical subject, or Ô in LFG’s terminology, of the first embedded predicate. LFG’s current formalism does provide a way to specify this. The function that links theta roles with grammatical functions (GF) is γ; thus γ(Ô) refers to the GF linked to the logical subject.56 Thus, ba’s lexical entry in (79) can now be made complete with an additional functional equation, as the last equation in (80).
(80) ba V
(↑ PRED) = ‘ba <(↑ SUBJ)(↑ OBJ)(↑ XCOMP)>’
(↑ OBJ) = (↑ XCOMP TOPIC) (↑ SUBJ) = (↑ XCOMP γ(Ô))
Given that the object of bei is the passive counterpart of the subject of ba, it also controls the GF linked to the logical subject, or Ô, of the first embedded predicate.