Abstract
This paper argues that the Invertible Construction (IC) in Chinese is a kind of distributive construction. What appears to be an inversion of word order is best understood as the division of the theme NPto be acted upon by a number of agents for an embedded event. This analysis best captures a number of otherwise intractable properties of the IC including the necessarily quantitative interpretation of the NPs and the incompatibility with adverbs of volition.
| Original language | English |
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| Pages | 206-211 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| Publication status | Published - 2015 |
| Event | 29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2015 - Shanghai, China Duration: 30 Oct 2015 → 1 Nov 2015 |
Conference
| Conference | 29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2015 |
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| Country/Territory | China |
| City | Shanghai |
| Period | 30/10/15 → 1/11/15 |