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Se­r­ial Verb Con­struc­tions in Chi­nese: An HPSG Ac­count

Au­thor: Ste­fan Müller and Janna Lipenkova

Key­words:

This paper ap­peared in 2009 in Ste­fan Müller (Ed): Pro­ceed­ings of the 16th In­ter­na­tional Con­fer­ence on Head-​Driven Phrase Struc­ture Gram­mar, Uni­ver­sity of Göttin­gen, Ger­many, Stan­ford: CSLI Pub­li­ca­tions, pages 234–254, doi: 10.21248/hpsg.2009.12.

This paper gives an ac­count of Se­r­ial Verb Con­struc­tions (SVCs) in Man­darin Chi­nese. After a ty­po­log­i­cal pre­sen­ta­tion of the phe­nom­e­non, we give an overview of the Chi­nese data. The in­ven­tory of SVC types is clas­si­fied ac­cord­ing to causal and tem­po­ral re­la­tions be­tween the com­po­nents. We dis­cuss prag­matic con­di­tions on the use of SVCs and al­ter­na­tive, se­man­ti­cally equiv­a­lent con­struc­tions. An HPSG analy­sis is pro­posed for marked SVCs which uses the in­ter­ac­tion be­tween as­pect mark­ing and the set of pos­si­ble sub­or­di­na­tive re­la­tions to de­duce the extra-​lexical mean­ing of the con­struc­tion. Par­tic­u­lar at­ten­tion is paid to the syn­tac­ti­cally pe­cu­liar SVC with shared in­ter­nal ar­gu­ments, which is ac­counted for by a non-​cancellation ap­proach to va­lence re­quire­ments.