Typological Differences between English and Chinese Multi-verb Constructions

Abstract

English and Chinese are different in the composition of Multi-verb Constructions (MVCs), which refer to a series of verbs appearing in a mono-clause, without pauses or conjunctions. English MVCs contain a finite verb which inflects with tense, combined with non-finite forms (e.g., The boss encouraged Jerry to attend the meeting). Chinese MVCs are in the form of bare verbs or verbs with aspectual morphemes. From the perspective of finiteness, this article analyzes the typological differences of morphological finiteness in English and semantic finiteness in Chinese.

The Acquisition of English Infinitives by Undergraduate Students in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

“…Nonfinite verbs in English do not change tense according to the subject, but in some languages like Chinese, however, neither grammatical tense nor inflected forms are used; they are mostly in the bare form of verbs and some with aspectual markers. Subject or object are used with a series of bare verbs that can be differentiated by their lexical cues (Klein, & Hendriks, 2000;Tang, 2019). The mismatch between infinitives in L1 and L2 sometimes poses additional difficulty (Slabakova, 2015).…”

Crosslinguistic influence on Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of English finite and nonfinite distinctions

“…MVCs in Chinese and English are alike in word order, lexical content, but different in finiteness. In some types of Chinese MVCs, such as sentences with verbs as subject or object, the series of bare verbs can be differentiated by their lexical cues (Klein, Li, & Hendriks, 2000;Tang, 2019). Specifically, matrix verbs can be identified because only they allow certain aspectual markers (e.g., perfective morpheme "le").…”