Three-layered hierarchical structure of Mandarin Chinese aspectual projections

Abstract

This study explores the hierarchical structures of Mandarin Chinese aspectual projections with a cartographic approach. We firstly revisit Mandarin aspectual expressions across three domains within a sentence, including preverbal aspectual adverbs, postverbal suffixes and sentence-final aspectual particles. Then we demonstrate that Mandarin aspectual projections are distributed in three zones (i.e., vP, TP and CP layers) by using appropriate position tests: transitivity tests for adverbs, the affixation order for verb suffixes, and location tests in the bǎ construction for both adverbs and suffixes. Finally, a three-layered topography of Mandarin aspectual projections is provided, which largely conforms to the universal hierarchy. The list of syntactic heads is expanded with the consideration of Mandarin data, especially for aspectual heads in the domain below VoiceP.