Agreement in imperative clauses: Evidence from object resumptive pronouns in Mandarin Chinese
Ka-Fai Yip, Xuetong Yuan
November 2024 

This study reports a case of interaction between jussives/imperatives and objects. The core data come from non-agreeing resumptive pronouns (NRPs) in Mandarin Chinese. We show that the NRP exhibits a multifaceted empirical profile that involves: (i) licensing by jussive clauses, (ii) patient roles of objects, and (iii) movement-derived properties. We argue that the intricate pattern can be accounted for by an Agree relation between the NRP and jussive head, coupled with interface conditions on partial Copy Deletion. The findings suggest that jussive is a syntactically active notion even in a language without inflectional morphology like Mandarin Chinese.
[Nov 2024: Minor formatting updated]

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008248 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	In Shaunak Phadnis, Carla Spellerberg, and Brynne Wilkinson, eds., Proceedings of the Fifty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS-54), vol.2, 235–244.
keywords:	jussive/imperative, agreement, objects, non-agreeing resumptive pronoun, partial copy deletion, mandarin chinese, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [October 2024] v1 [July 2024]
Downloaded:	879 times

 

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