On Duratives and Frequentatives Sandwiched Between V and O in Mandarin

This paper makes a syntactic analysis of duratives and frequentatives sandwiched between V and O in Mandarin Chinese. Such postverbal duratives and frequentatives were often treated uniformly either as adjuncts or complements of verbs. The unified analysis not only conceals the distinctions between them but also their differences from nominal classifiers. We claim that postverbal duratives and frequentatives merges with the object but not with the verb specifically, but the duratives should be treated as adjuncts of NP, and the frequentatives project a function projection which takes NP as its complement. This non-unified analysis can nicely capture the following facts, e.g. the insertion of de and the requirement of subcategorization etc.