Chinese verb copying constructions: A labeling account

Abstract

In this article, I will show that Chinese verb copying constructions lend strong empirical support to Chomsky’s (2013) labeling theory. In particular, I will argue that the cooccurrence of the object and the postverbal complement in the vP domain gives rise to a symmetric structure of the type {XP, YP} that cannot be labeled by the labeling algorithm and that verb copying is derived from VP movement, a strategy which is applied to solve the labeling problem at the moment of Transfer. This new approach will provide a principled explanation for the core properties of verb copying constructions as well as some related phenomena. Finally, I will argue that despite the apparent similarity, verb copying constructions in Chinese should be treated separately from the so-called Predicate Cleft constructions, a well attested phenomenon in many languages, in that only the former involves a labeling failure inside the vP domain.