Improper verb doubling in Mandarin Chinese and the Williams Cycle
Tom Meadows, Qiuhao Charles Yan
August 2024 

Within Mandarin Chinese root clauses, verb doubling effects are attested in either a clause-medial or clause-initial position (Lai 2021, Meadows & Yan 2023, to appear, a.o.). We treat this contrast as VPfronting to a lower or higher position in the clausal spine. Crucially, we show in this paper that cross-clausal VP-fronting to the lower, clause-medial position is only possible out of a limited class of complement clauses, unlike VP-fronting to the clausal periphery. We offer an approach to such movement restrictions based on the Williams Cycle (Meadows 2024, Poole 2022, Williams 2003, 2011), and predictions about VP-fronting across multiple levels of embedding.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008332 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear in Proceedings of WCCFL42
keywords:	verb doubling, improper movement, vp-fronting, the williams cycle, mandarin chinese, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [August 2024]
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