Speaker: Charlie Yan (QMUL)
Title: On the locality profile of verb doubling in Mandarin Chinese
Time: Tuesday, May 7th, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: Within Mandarin Chinese root clauses, verb doubling effects are attested in either a clause-medial or clause-initial position (Cheng 2007; Meadows and Yan 2023; a.o.). I treat this contrast as VP-fronting to a lower or higher position in the clausal spine. Crucially, I show in this talk 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. I offer an approach to such movement restrictions based on the Williams Cycle (Williams 2003, 2013; Poole 2022), and predictions about VP-fronting across multiple levels of embedding.