The Syntax of the Flip-flop Construction in Mandarin Chinese

This paper proposes a ’two-verb analysis‘ of the Chinese flip-flop construction.Under this analysis,a verb like chi (eat) in wu ge ren chi le yi guo fan (five people ate one pot of rice) is a canonical transitive verb,while the same verb chi (eat) in wu ge ren chi le yi guo fan (one pot of rice was supplied to five people to eat) is an intransitive copular verb,which resembles measure verbs such as measure and weigh in English.The two sentence structures are not transformationally related and each has its own distinct way of syntactic derivation,accounting for all the semantic and syntactic differences between them.