On The BA Construction In Chinese From The Perspective Of Syntax/Semantics Interface

The BA (把) construction in Chinese is unique in its sentence structure. Different from the most frequently seen sentence order of subject-verb-object, it follows the pattern of "NP1 BA NP2 VP". A lot of studies have been devoted to this construction. Some of them give accurate descriptions of this construction, but few go beyond descriptive adequacy.This paper discusses this construction from the perspective of syntax/semantics interface. It follows the theory that it is the aspectual property of the predicate that determines how the lexical information is mapped onto the underlying syntactic representation. Based on this theory, it is proposed that the condition on the use of BA construction is one of the aspectual properties of the predicate: delimitedness. Only predicates describing delimited events are compatible with the BA construction. If a verb is not a delimiting one, it should be converted into a delimiting predicate before it can appear in a sentence of BA construction. The noun phrase in the NP2 position should also participate in delimiting the event described by the predicate.Compared with previous studies, the theory adopted in this paper covers more language facts. More importantly, it provides uniform solution to some phenomena always considered special in the literature, e.g. the presence of intransitive verb and certain aspectual marker in a sentence of BA construction. Besides, this paper provides explanation to the proposed condition governing the use of this construction, thus contributing to the explanatory power of the grammar.