Abstract
This paper investigates asymmetries in doubling among verbs, objects and subjects in Cantonese. It is shown that each of these elements has a distinct doubling profile in topic constructions and right dislocation: doubling is sometimes prohibited, required or optional. Couched in terms of the copy theory of movement, I suggest that the operation responsible for erasing copies in a movement chain is regulated by phonological requirements that follow from a version of cyclic linearization. Particularly, I propose that the copy-erasing operation can be suspended as a last resort in cases where its application would otherwise violate phonological requirements imposed by cyclic linearization. The differences in doubling possibility among verbs, objects and subjects follow from the availability of the edge position of a phase to these elements. The proposal derives the Cantonese doubling pattern without recourse to the phrase-structural status of the (non-)doubling elements and maintains that the mechanism that determines copy pronunciation is the same for heads and phrases. I take this as a further piece of evidence for the unification of head and phrasal movement, resonating with much recent work on this topic.
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Notes
Throughout the paper, I consistently omit the tones in the romanization of Cantonese for simplicity, except for sentence-final particles, where tones are represented to avoid ambiguity.
The phenomenon is called verb doubling clefts in Cheng and Vicente (2013) in Mandarin, which involves both a topic reading of the verb and a verum focus reading. Since the precise discourse interpretive effect does not bear on the arguments in the current paper, I use the term “verb topicalization” as a convenient label.
It is also possible to topicalize the lower verb sik ‘eat’, where doubling is obligatory.
I thank Audrey Li for pointing out this difference to me.
In Fox and Pesetsky (2005), movement is construed as an operation of remerge, which establishes multi-dominance relations among the elements.
This is arguably the case for object shift in Scandinavian languages, see Fox and Pesetsky (2005) for extensive discussion.
For concreteness, I further assume that both involve head-to-specifier movement (see Cheng and Vicente 2013; Lee 2017). Indeed, this assumption receives empirical support from recent works on different languages (e.g. Toyoshima 2001; Vicente 2007; Harizanov 2019; Harizanov and Gribanova 2019), where they reveal that some instances of head movement (especially concerning predicate fronting) behave similarly to phrasal movement: a head can move long-distance into a specifier position without obeying Head Movement Constraint (Travis 1984).
I abstract over the standard subject movement to Spec TP for its irrelevance.
For simplicity, the sentence-final particle ge2 which is external to the vP is not shown in the derivation.
An anonymous reviewer points out that modal verbs such as wui ‘will’ can be doubled as well, as in (i).
One potential concern is that modal verbs might occupy a position beyond vP such that their relative position with the vP-internal elements is not fixed upon the Spell-Out ofvP and hence doubling is expected not to be necessitated. It should be noted, however, that the modal verbs have been argued to be lexical predicates, heading a V/v position (Lin and Tang 1995). In such case, modal verbs double in the same way as soeng ‘want’. Alternatively, it is possible that modal verbs are also phase heads. If we follow a contextual approach to phasehood as advocated by Bošković (2014) where the highest position of an extended projection constitutes a phase, doubling is as expected.
For illustrative purposes, I assume a rightward movement approach of right dislocation, but the analysis is compatible with whatever mechanism causes the verb to end up in the rightmost position (e.g. a Kaynean-style multiple leftward movement).
Interestingly enough, Lai (2019) observes that co-indexation between the object and the right dislocated element is disallowed, which is in line with the observation that objects cannot be doubled.
An anonymous reviewer raises concerns over cases like (i), where the subject and the dislocated element are co-indexed, but they are not identical (referred to as Imperfect Copying in Cheung (2015)).
I assume that the object movement is achieved by some ‘tucking-in’ operation, landing in a position below the subject (Richards 2001).
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this contrast.
One possible explanation is that the indirect object is accompanied by a null preposition/dative marker that forms a larger phrase with the indirect object (Tang 1998a). It may be that the indirect object is too embedded or object fronting cannot target a prepositional phrase. In either case, the indirect object is immobile.
In a similar vein, this line of reasoning also rules out non-doubling cases like (i), where doubling of ngo is forced. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this example.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
See Cheung (2015) for a slightly different scenario and more discussions on the contrastive function of the doubled elements.
A similar condition is proposed in Landau (2006, p. 57).
Further challenges have been discussed in Cheng and Vicente (2013), where they suggest that it is puzzling that morphological fusion does not apply to objects (i.e. no doubling in object topicalization). Citing an example from Brazilian Sign Language (Nunes and Quadros 2006), they note that it is possible to double wh-expressions (in addition to heads), which presumably have a complex internal structure (Cable 2007). Words in capital letters indicate the glosses for Brazilian Sign Language.
The idea that the linearization domain of vP varies across languages has its roots in Ko (2005), Ko (2007), who proposes that the linearization domain of Korean is vP, rather than VP (which is assumed to be the linearization domain for some Scandinavian languages; see also discussions in Fox and Pesetsky (2005, section 5).
It should be noted that movement of the verb without doubling is also disallowed :
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Acknowledgements
For comments and discussions, I thank Hajime Hoji, Stefan Keine, Audrey Li, Victor Junnan Pan, David Pesetsky, Deniz Rudin, Andrew Simpson, Ka-Fai Yip and the audience at LSA Linguistics Institute 2019 and WCCFL 38. Thanks also go to two anonymous reviewers for constructive suggestions and comments. All remaining errors are mine.
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Lee, T.TM. Asymmetries in doubling and Cyclic Linearization. J East Asian Linguist 30, 109–139 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-021-09222-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-021-09222-2