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Licensing “gapless” bei passives

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Abstract

This paper investigates “gapless” bei passives in Mandarin Chinese and the way they are licensed. It is discovered that if the embedded predicate of a bei passive contains a weak NP, then the bei passive can be gapless. The proposal of this paper is that the weak NP introduces a variable, which can be bound by the operator Op at the embedded IP. Op need not move from an argument position in the embedded predicate of the bei passive; it can be merged directly to the embedded IP and bind the variable introduced by the weak NP.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Tsing Hua University, 101, Section 2, Guangfu Road, Hsinchu, 300, Taiwan

    Tzong-Hong Jonah Lin

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  1. Tzong-Hong Jonah Lin
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Correspondence to Tzong-Hong Jonah Lin.

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Lin, TH.J. Licensing “gapless” bei passives. J East Asian Linguist 18, 167–177 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-009-9039-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-009-9039-y

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