The Syntactic Derivation of Verb Gapping in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

The study discusses the syntactic derivation mechanism of verb gapping in Mandarin Chinese, which exists in the second conjunct of the construction. First, the paper introduces Mandarin Chinese lacks the canonical English-like verb gapping construction based on previous studies, in that verb gapping in Chinese is allowed only in non-generic VPs, may not be paired with an antecedent in the adjacent conjunct, and could appear in a subordinate construction. Second, different from the widely discussed across-the-board (ATB) movement or the VP-ellipsis analysis in the canonical English verb gapping construction, or the verb raising or verb ellipsis in the Chinese verb gapping structure, this study adopts that verb gaps in Mandarin Chinese are actually multiple fragments of the construction. The object-NP in the target gapping clause is proposed to undergo focalization, within the sentential (IP)-internal domain. Following the VP-internal subject hypothesis, the subject-NP then moves from Spec-vP to Spec-IP, motivated by EPP-feature for left peripheries. The remnant constituent vP is hypothesized with deletion at the PF-interface, giving rise to the surface “Subject-NP + Object-NP” order. If the direction of the assumption is acceptable, the proposal of focalization in the sentence-internal domain once again empirically confirms the ‘parallelism’/‘identity’ between multiple fragment clauses in the gapping construction in Mandarin Chinese.