A Syntactic Approach to Monomorphemic Lexical Causatives in Mandarin Chinese

This paper attempts to account for monomorphemic lexical causatives in Mandarin Chinese in the framework of Distributed Morphology.We distinguish two types of lexical causatives which differ in syntactic and semantic behaviors: Syntactically, the first type represented by kai(开) does not allow passivization and anaphora in the case of causer subjects, whereas the second type represented by hui(毁) does; Semantically, kai-type causatives exhibit polysemous verb meanings, while hui-type causatives a monosemous verb meaning; Cross-linguistically, hui-type causatives show the same syntactic behaviors as English causatives, while kai-type causatives do not.Our account of these properties consists of three claims.The first is that the causer is introduced in the layer of vP in kai-type causatives, while the causer and agent are both introduced in the specifier of VoiceP in hui-type causatives.The second is that the saliency of the 'restitutive' reading in lexical causatives is determined by two major factors.One pertains to the polysemy of the verb which results from the different syntactic constructions its root enters, or from its allosemes in different syntactic environments.The other factor is how frequently the verb is used.The final claim is that the presence or absence of D feature carried by the light verb v may lead to various syntactic phenomena of (anti)causatives in such languages as Mandarin Chinese, ancient Chinese and English.