A Formal Investigation Of The Verb Copying Construction In The Generative Framework

This work aims to an explanatory theory on the verb copying construction (VCC), which has two verbs occurring simultaneously, one followed by an object-like element and the other followed by a so-called complement. The sentence structure is Subject + V1 + Object + V2 + Complement.Different from the previous analyses such as Li (1990), Yang (2000) and Cheng (2007), we treat the VCC as a TP-internal focus structure. Attracted by the strong [FOC] feature in the FocP, the focused VP moves to the [Spec, FocP].We classify the VCC into the marked (with such overt markers as LE/GUO and DE) and the unmarked (without overt markers). Following Lin (2001), LE/GUO and DE are taken as light verbs which are base-generated. Because they are suffixal by nature, they need a content verb to attach to. The matrix V is copied and merges with the light verb.As for the so-called verb complement, we regard it as a v' -adjunct since it is neither the internal nor the external argument of the matrix verb, but eventually has semantic relationship with the matrix verb as an adverbial of result or manner.