This paper has studied the part-of-speech assignments for Mandarin gei in five different contexts: verbal, preverbal, postverbal, postobject, and purposive.
Huang and Ahrens’s (1999) unified serial verb construction of preverbal,
postobject, and purposive gei, which renders the dative alternations non-existent in Mandarin, is critically examined. The accounts proposed here fully recognize the rightful place of the verb gei in a serial verb construction. However,
prepositional gei PP, preverbal as well as postverbal, is well-motivated and simplifies the grammar. The suffix analysis of V-gei in Huang and Ahrens (1999) is refuted, as posing the verb gei to be the head in V-gei compounding offers the simplest solution and the most precise generalizations. The analysis of gei as a grammaticalized complementizer in purposive clauses in Ting and Chang (2004) is also endorsed, along with the verbal and prepositional analyses.
In addition to argumentation based on synchronic facts, support from historical developments has also been sought.
Throughout our argumentation and discussion, it is clear that simplicity and generality in grammatical descriptions are far more important considerations than lexical unity. The diversified part-of-speech assignments of gei are hardly surprising, as the most frequently used lexical items are usually the most versatile and susceptible to variation and change. Given the nature of lexical idiosyncrasies and commonplace lexical polysemy, lexical unity, if not a myth, should never be gained at the expense of simple and precise grammatical generalizations.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to Lingua’s anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, which led to great improvement in the organization and argumentation of the paper. I also thank Karen S. Chung, Miao-ling Hsieh, Jen Ting, and Miller Chang for discussions on some of the issues. However, I am solely responsible for the content of the paper. Research reported in this paper has been partly funded by NSC grants 92-2411-H-004-024 and 93-2411-H-004-006. Part of the research for the paper was done during my visits to the School of Information Technology, Bond University in 2003 and 2004. I thank the dean, Professor Ron Davison, for his kind and continuous support.
REFERENCES
Bender, E., 2000. The syntax of Mandarin BA: Reconsidering the verbal analysis. Journal of East Asian Languages 9, 105-145.
Bresnan, J., 1982. Control and complementation. In: Bresnan J. (Ed.), The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 282-390.
Bresnan, J., 1989. The syntactic projection problem and comparative syntax of locative inversion. Journal of Information Science and Engineering 5, 287-303.
Chao, Y., l968. A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.
Cheng, L., Huang J., Li A., and Tang J., 1999. Hoo, hoo, hoo: Syntax of the causative, dative, and passive construction in Chinese. In: Ting, P. (Ed.), Contemporary Studies on the Min Dialects, Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series No. 14.
Chi, R., 1985. A Lexical Analysis of Verb-Noun Compounds in Mandarin Chinese. Crane Publishing, Taipei.
Chung, K., 2004. Mandarin Compound Verbs. Doctoral dissertation, Leiden University.
Her, O., 1989. An LFG account for Chinese BEI sentences. Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association 24 (3), 67-89.
Her, O., 1990. Grammatical Functions and Verb Subcategorization in Mandarin Chinese. Doctoral dissertation, University of Hawaii. (Also as 199l, Crane Publishing, Taipei.)
Her, O., 1997. Interaction and Variation in the Chinese VO Construction, Crane Publishing, Taipei.
Her, O., 1999. Interaction of thematic structure and syntactic structures: on Mandarin dative alternations. In: Chinese Languages and Linguistics V:
Interaction in Language, Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, 373-412
Huang, C., 1992. Certainty in functional uncertainty. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 20 (2), 247-288.
Huang, C., 1993. Mandarin Chinese and the lexical mapping theory: a study of the interaction of morphology and argument changing. Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology 62 (2), 337-388.
Huang, C. and Ahrens K., 1999. The function and category of gei in Mandarin ditransitive constructions. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 27(2), 1-26.
Huang, C. and Mo R., 1992. Mandarin ditransitive construction and the category of gei, BLS, 18, 109-122.
Huang, J., 1984. Phrase structure, lexical integrity, and Chinese compounds.
Journal of the Chinese Teachers Association 19 (2), 53-78.
Huang, H., 1998. Chinese as a headless language in compounding morphology.
In: Packard, J., (ed.), New Approaches to Chinese Word Formation:
Morphology, Phonology and the Lexicon in Modern and Ancient Chinese.
Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs. Mouton-de Gruyter, Berlin, pp.
26-283.
Hwang, J., 1998. A comparative study on the grammaticalization of “saying”
verbs in Chinese. In: Sun C. (Ed.), Proceedings of NACCL 10: 10th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics, pp. 574-584.
Hwang, J., 2000. On Grammaticalization in Serial Verb Constructions in Chinese. Doctoral dissertation, University of Hawaii.
Li, A., 1990. Order and Constituency in Mandarin Chinese. Kluwer, Dordrecht.
Li, C. and Thompson S., 1981. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.
Liu, D., 2001. Hanyu geiyulei shuangjiwu jiegou de leixingxue kaocha (A typological study on the double-object construction of Chinese give verbs).
Zhongguo Yuwen 5.
Lord, C., Yap F., and Iwasaki S., 2002. Grammaticalization of ‘give’: African and Asian Perspectives. In: New Reflections on Grammaticalization, Wischer, Ilse and Gabriele Diewald (eds.), 217–235. John Benjamins
McCawley, J., 1992. Justifying part-of-speech assignments in Mandarin Chinese.
Journal of Chinese Linguistics 20 (2), 211-246.
Mo, R., Huang, C., and Chen K., 1991. Serial verb constructions in Mandarin Chinese. Paper presented at the Third International Conference on Teaching Chinese as a Second Language. Taipei, Taiwan, December 28-31, 1991.
Peyraube, A., 1986. Shuang binyu jiegou cong Han dai zhi Tang dai de lishi fazhan (Double-object constructions from Han to Tang). Zhongguo yuwen 3, 204-216.
Peyraube, A., 1991. Syntactic changes in Chinese: On grammaticalization.
Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology 59 (3), 617-652.
Peyraube, A., 1999. Historical change in Chinese grammar. Cahiers de Linguistique –Asie Orientale 28 (2), 177-226.
Starosta, S., 1985. Mandarin case marking. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 13 (2), 215-266.
Sybesma, R., 1999. The Mandarin VP, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht.
Tang, J., 1990. Chinese Phrase Structure and the Extended X'-Theory. Doctoral dissertation, Cornell University.
Tang, T., 1979. Guoyu Yufa Yanjiu Lunji (Studies in Chinese syntax). Student Books, Taipei.
Teng, S., 1975. A Semantic Study of Transitivity Relations in Chinese, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.
Ting, J., 1998, Deriving the bei-construction in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 7 (4), 319-354.
Ting, J. and Chang M., 2004. The category of gei in Mandarin Chinese and grammaticalization. Taiwan Journal of Linguistics 2 (2), 45-74.
Xu, D., 1994. The status of marker gei in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 22 (2), 363-394.
Zhang, M., 2000. The grammaticalization of give in Chinese dialects: A cognitive approach. Paper presented at the 9th International Conference on Chinese Linguistics, Singapore, June 25-27, 2000.
Zhang, S., 1990. Correlations between the double object construction and preposition stranding. Linguistic Inquiry 21 (2), 312-316.
ABSTRACT
This paper justifies the different part-of-speech assignments for Mandarin gei in five of its different uses: verbal, preverbal, postverbal, postobject, and
purposive, and challenges the unified verbal analysis of preverbal, postobject, and purposive gei. In spite of the grammaticality of postobject verb gei in a serial verb construction, the prepositional dative in Mandarin involves precisely the preposition gei, either in its postobject position or preverbally. The affixal analysis of postverbal gei is refuted, as gei is in fact the verb head in V-gei compounding. The analysis of gei as a complementizer in purposive clauses is endorsed. Finally, I discuss the generality of the analyses put forth and also provide more supporting evidence from historical developments.
Keywords: Gei; Part-of-speech; Prepositional dative; Verb compound; Dative alternation