The syntax of pronoun fronting in Late Archaic Chinese negated clauses

Abstract

This paper proposes a syntactic analysis of the complex phenomenon of pronominal object fronting in negated clauses in Late Archaic Chinese (LAC). I first propose that partitive case is assigned to objects in LAC negated clauses, accounting for the fact that only pronouns in LAC undergo fronting, since they have a person feature and cannot be licensed by a defective case like partitive. I next identify the structural constraints accounting for when pronouns do and do not front in LAC negated clauses. In the context of the sentential negator 不 bu, only pronouns base generated in the verb’s complement position undergo fronting. I propose that the dislocation is head movement to the phase head v. This accounts for the large number of cases in which pronoun fronting fails to take place in the context of 不 bu. In contrast, pronouns nearly always front to the negative quantifier 莫 mo and the aspectual negator 未 wei. I show that this is because these negators occupy higher structural positions, which allows phrasal movement over a greater distance. I further show how the discrepancy between the two positions for negation is the result of diachronic change. 不 bu historically exhibited the same behavior as the other negators but came to occupy a lower position in the LAC period, which in turn resulted in the more local relationship between 不 bu and the base position of the pronominal object in LAC.