Abstract
This book deals with a number of constructions in Mandarin which involve the main verb and the material following it, such as the object NPs, resultative phrases, durative expressions and other elements. In this chapter I want to formulate some of the assumptions I adhere to and give an overview of the main topics and questions we will concern ourselves with in the rest of this book. I would like to start out by putting these topics and questions, and the way they are formulated, in a historical perspective.
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Notes
Extensive and principled discussion of (2) may also be found in Tang (1990; esp. p. 40–42).
Regarding matters of definition and convention, I would like to make the following comments. This book will be concerned with the variety of Chinese called “Northern-Mandarin” in Li and Thompson (1981:3–4), the variety of Chinese spoken in the north and north-east of China; I simply refer to it with “Mandarin”. The Mandarin examples are represented in the pinyin transcription, except that tones have been omitted. The glosses and the translations that go with the example sentences are mostly mine, even if the sentence itself was taken from the work of others. In the glosses certain not easily translatable morphemes are left untranslated and are instead represented in small capitals (“LE”, “BA”); some sentence final particles are glossed as “Prt” (particle). In the examples and the glosses, verb-le is generally distinguished from sentence-le by way of a hyphen before verb-le (“-le” and “-LE” vs “le” and “LE”); this is done for typographical convenience more than anything else, and when the sentence ends in a verb followed by le a hyphen is added when the choice between verb-le and sentence-le is irrelevant for the discussion at hand. Measure words/classifiers are simply glossed as CL unless their meaning is relevant for one reason or another, in which case the English cognate will be added in superscript. Thus, yi-ge ren will generally be glossed as “/one-CL person/ ‘one person’”, while yi-qun ren will come out as “/one-CLgroup person/ ‘a group of people’”. Ta, the singular third person pronoun, is translated as ‘he/him/his’, though feminine and neuter translations would have been other options. As to quotations from non-English language sources, the English translations are mine. For the rest, most terms and abbreviations will be defined and explained as we proceed.
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Sybesma, R. (1999). The Postverbal Constraint. In: The Mandarin VP. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 44. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9163-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9163-8_1
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