The Syntax of Mandarin Long Gei Passives Revisited

Abstract This article examines the syntactic structure of long gei passives in Mandarin Chinese and argues against the prepositional analysis of gei in long passives. Refining the ditransitive verb analysis of Lin and Huang (2015), we propose that gei is an object-control verb which selects a vP complement rather than a CP or IP complement. By providing supporting evidence for the vP analysis through drawing a parallel from object preposing, we show that long gei passives behave on a par with sentences with verbs involving vP complementation like changshi ‘try’, not with those involving IP complementation like jihua ‘plan’. We also show that the ditransitive analysis is supported by syntactic parallels between long gei passives and typical ditransitive sentences in terms of transformation into pseudo-clefts and topicalization of the outer object. The result of this research suggests that two types of object-control structures should be distinguished. One of them involves an IP complement taken by verbs like qiangpo ‘force’, while the other involves a vP complement taken by gei/bei in long passives.