A dynamic account of lian…dou in Chinese verb doubling cleft construction

Abstract

This paper deals with the puzzling Chinese verb doubling construction in the schema of lian…dou (verb doubling lian…dou construction, VDLD) from a parsing perspective. Within the framework of Dynamic Syntax (Kempson et al., 2001; Cann et al., 2005) which allows the interaction between structural, semantic and pragmatic information, it is shown that VDLD can receive a straightforward explanation on the assumption that the construction is licensed by an explicit or implicit context. Specifically, it is argued that (i) the first verb marked by lian is a topicalized focus, whose parse involves reusing the structure projected by a scalar implicature; (ii) dou is an intensifier-like adverb, whose parse suggests that the alternatives projected by a scalar implicature should be true in the relevant context.