The goal of this paper is to defend the complementation approach to Chinese passives and discuss its consequences. Four interesting issues related to Chinese passives are examined: (a) the categorial status of bei in Chinese passives, (b) the possibility of having an empty agent argument, (c) subcategorization of passive verbs and their grammatical status, and (d) the function of gei in passive and nonpassive sentences.The findings of this paper are as follows. First of all, it is argued that bei is not a preposition in Chinese long passives and is not a passive morpheme in short passives. Second, assuming that the complementation approach is on the right track, it is argued that Chinese long passives are ECM structures. Hence, the embedded agent argument can be neither pro nor PRO. The agent argument cannot be a trace either, because movement will be blocked by a null operator adjoined to the embedded clause. Third, after comparing several passive verbs in Mandarin and Cantonese, it is observed that only the passive verbal elements that are less lexical, more functional may enter short passives. Fourth, it is argued that preverbal gei is a marker that marks affectedness, which has nothing to do with passivization. The occurrence of gei in various apparently unrelated contexts is explained under a unified account.
A novel analysis of the syntax of utterance particles in Chinese is proposed in this paper. In terms of their diachronic origin, there are two types of utterance particles in Chinese, namely predicative utterance particles and non-predicative utterance particles, both of which are derived by a generalized syntactic schema. It is proposed that utterance particles are the complement of a functional category, forming a conjunction structure. The schema can be applied to other sentence-final expressions in Chinese and English, leading to a conjecture that sentence-final expressions are not heads.Keywords: Utterance particles; Conjunction; Tags; Mandarin; Cantonese
Word order of utterance particlesUtterance particles in Chinese, which are also known as "sentence-final particles", are functional words that occur in the sentence-final position, expressing some grammatical meanings and pragmatic information, such as the speaker's attitude. For example, in Mandarin, the interrogative 嗎 ma in 1 and the assertive 吧 ba in 2 are typical utterance particles that convey some pragmatic information. In Cantonese 喎 wo in 3 with the low rising tone ([wɔ 13 ] in IPA) is a hearsay evidential utterance particle.
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