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The syntax of pronoun fronting in Late Archaic Chinese negated clauses

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Abstract

This paper proposes a syntactic analysis of the complex phenomenon of pronominal object fronting in negated clauses in Late Archaic Chinese (LAC). I first propose that partitive case is assigned to objects in LAC negated clauses, accounting for the fact that only pronouns in LAC undergo fronting, since they have a person feature and cannot be licensed by a defective case like partitive. I next identify the structural constraints accounting for when pronouns do and do not front in LAC negated clauses. In the context of the sentential negator 不 , only pronouns base generated in the verb’s complement position undergo fronting. I propose that the dislocation is head movement to the phase head v. This accounts for the large number of cases in which pronoun fronting fails to take place in the context of 不 . In contrast, pronouns nearly always front to the negative quantifier 莫 and the aspectual negator 未 wèi. I show that this is because these negators occupy higher structural positions, which allows phrasal movement over a greater distance. I further show how the discrepancy between the two positions for negation is the result of diachronic change. 不 historically exhibited the same behavior as the other negators but came to occupy a lower position in the LAC period, which in turn resulted in the more local relationship between 不 and the base position of the pronominal object in LAC.

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Notes

  1. See also Wang (2016) for an analysis of pronoun fronting as targeting a focus position, though she does not present evidence that the movement is motivated by focus.

  2. Interestingly, there is a temporal difference between (18b) and (18c). (18c) concerns a past event, while the wh-questions lacking fronting are all future. It may be possible, then, to make a connection with tense or (ir)realis mood, but I save this investigation for future research.

  3. Note that this is not due to Locality. Aldridge (2010a, 2015) shows that wh-fronting is possible from a PP.

  4. Csirmaz (2005: 73) adopts a somewhat different definition of divisibility: “For any subinterval t’ of the event time, there is a subinterval t” of the event time containing t’ such that the event predicate also holds at t”.” This is intended to avoid the “granularity” problem identified by Hinrichs (1985). For example, a mass noun like water is divisible, but it contains proper subparts which are not water but rather substances smaller than molecules of water, e.g. atoms comprising those molecules.

  5. I assume with Aldridge (2019) that C-T Inheritance (in the sense of Chomsky 2008) does not generally take place in LAC, so the subject moves to the specifier of the amalgamated C/T head in order to value nominative case.

  6. Li (2017) points out that some of the cases cited by Aldridge (2016) as ECM constructions should be analyzed as object control. I will not attempt to adjudicate between these two analyses. For the purposes of this paper, the DP in question is not base generated as the complement of the negated verb, so it is not expected to front to negation on my analysis. In object control structures, this DP would occupy the specifier of VP projected by the causative verb shǐ.

  7. For simplicity, I place the two internal arguments in the complement and specifier positions of VP. It is also possible to account for double object constructions on an applicative approach of the type proposed by Pylkkanen (2002). In such a structure, the two internal arguments occupy the complement and specifier positions of a “low” ApplP, which is in turn selected by the lexical verb. The Appl head would move to V, and this complex verb would continue on to v. After cliticization of the pronominal goal argument, the theme would become complement to the complex verbal head and be assigned partitive case.

  8. An anonymous reviewer points out that not all of the examples shown in this section are unambiguously biclausal. This is true, but as I show below, the same constraints on pronoun fronting obtain, regardless of whether the higher verbal category is a control verb or an auxiliary, so I consider both to be long distance movement contexts.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Barbara Meisterernst and Karen Zagona for discussion on various aspects of this manuscript. I also wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful criticisms.

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Aldridge, E. The syntax of pronoun fronting in Late Archaic Chinese negated clauses. J East Asian Linguist 30, 39–79 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-021-09219-x

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