A Tale of Two Peripheries: Evidence from Chinese Adverbials, Light Verbs, Applicatives and Object Fronting (2)

Abstract

This paper sets out to join a recent inquiry into the peripheral area around the edge of vP along the line of Belletti (2004, 2005). It is suggested that, in comparison with other languages more agglutinating in nature, Chinese provides an ideal testing ground for this venture in that its linguistic expressions are often constructed analytically (cf. Huang 2004), and their "loosened" parts may spread over functional projections in a minimalist manner, i.e., Merge instead of Move very much in line with the notion of Lexical Courtesy. We show that their distribution concentrates on two specific areas, that is, the vP periphery vs. the left periphery in Rizzi's (1997) sense, which in turn are associated with comitativity and causality respectively through the syntax-semantics interface.