TRANSITIVITY AND THE BA CONSTRUCTION

TRANSITIVITY AND THE BA CONSTRUCTION

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In this paper, I discuss the legitimacy of positing a Transitivity Projection (= TrP cf.Bowers 1993, 1997, 2001 and 2002) in the BA construction in Mandarin Chinese.BA has been proposed to be a semantically-bleached verb, inserted in the v position (Huang 1997 and Lin 2001).Several pieces of evidence such as manner adverbial placement (cf.

Huang, Li and Li 2009) and GEI-insertion (cf.Tang 2001) indicate that there must be a functional wd6001fsyz projection between the vP and VP to host the BA NP.I propose that a TrP is probably the most apt candidate for the XP.I also argue, in contrast to the proposal by Huang, Li and Li (2009), that the present proposal which employs a TrP captures chaps ralph lauren cologne most of the properties of the BA construction.

A comparison with the structure of the BEI construction also shows that the TrP proposal fits into the general picture of current linguistic theory on transitive constructions without extra stipulations.