Double object constructions and the anomalous syntax of GIVE in Cantonese  

Oleh:

Lam, Olivia S.-C.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Sciences (Full Text) vol. 45 (2014), page 71-95.
Topik: Syntax; Chinese (Cantonese); Ditransitive verbs; Double object constructions; Object (as a grammatical function)
Fulltext: 45_Lam.pdf (824.21KB)

Isi artikel

The default definition for a double object construction (DOC) is almost invariably ‘a construction like the give-construction’. While the GIVE-construction may be a crosslinguistically representative example of such constructions, within Cantonese, the construction certainly displays syntactic behaviour that is anomalous. One such anomaly is that, in the GIVE-construction, the theme-object immediately follows the verb, while the recipient-object is the argument that is the furthest away from the verb. This order of objects is quite rarely found across languages. It should, however, be noted that Cantonese as a language does not have an exceptional order of non-subject arguments in DOCs, the verb bei ‘give’ in this language, and this verb only, does. The syntax of the GIVEconstruction patterns with that of all other DOCs in many other respects. Proposals, couched within the Lexical-Functional Grammar framework, are offered to capture these facts

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