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Separable words and cognate objects in Mandarin Chinese PAN Haihua and YE Kuang It is traditionally acknowledged that some compounds in Mandarin Chinese can be separated. For example, the intransitive verb bang-mang "help out", a disyllabic compound, can be easily split apart to form a phrase like bang to de mang "do him a favor", with the possessor ta de ‘his' inserted between bang and mang. This phenomenon has posted a great difficulty for linguists to differentiate words from phrases in Chinese, and some linguists even claim that compounds like bang-mang are actually phrases when separated. Recently, Guo(2011) attempts to resolve the above issue by arguing that the so-called separation actually does not happen, upholding the Lexical Integrity Principle(Chomsky1970) which maintains that words cannot be structurally separated, and what actually happens is some kind of deletion at a certain level of syntactic derivation, an insightful idea, though with some unresolved problems. Following the same idea that the so-called separation is an epiphenomenon, this paper argues that constructions containing the so-called separable words are in fact cognate object constructions in Chinese, derived from disyllabic intransitive verbs, as the transitive counterpart of bang-mang, bang-zhu‘help',for example, cannot form a cognate object construction. The paper points out that it is a unique property of disyllabic intransitive verbs to form the cognate object construction and claims that even normal transitive verb phrases can form a cognate object construction after the bare noun object is incorporated into the verb in syntax. The motivation of utilizing the cognate object construction is to accommodate the dependents that are beyond the syntactic capacity of intransitive verbs in question. The following four major steps are employed to generate the relevant construction from a disyllabic intransitive verb: using the copy of the verb in the Numeration to form a verb and cognate object construction, nominalizing the copy, generating all the dependents of the copy using NP syntax, and applying complementary deletion to the verb and its copy at PF. The current analysis has the following four advantages over previous analyses. The first is that the eventive meaning of the so-called object in a separable word and its property of taking an eventive not a nominal classifier can be easily accounted for, as the so-called object is actually the copy of the disyllabic intransitive verb in question. The second is it helps explain the syntax-semantics mismatch, as observed in the previous literature, namely that the modifier to the so-called object obeys the nominal syntax in Chinese, though semantically, it modifies the event denoted by the verb in question. The third is that the preference for using cognate object constructions instead of adverbial modifiers is thus expected, a tendency long been overlooked but noted from the new perspective taken in the paper. The forth is our analysis has brought the disyllabic intransitives in Mandarin into the family of syntactic universals, which is not a byproduct but a natural result, because taking cognate objects is a cross-linguistic property of intransitive verbs. Therefore, the traditional ideas on separable words such as "phrasal words", "words without separation and phrases after separation", "continnum from words to phrases", etc. should be either eliminated or partially modified, upholding the Lexical Integrity Principle, and the distinction between words and phrases can thus be made clearly under the current analysis. Keywords: Cognate objects; nominalization; complementary deletion; disyllabic intransitive verbs. (责任编辑：admin) |