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oa On preverbal lai in Mandarin Chinese
- Source: Concentric, Volume 52, Issue 1, Jun 2026, p. 52 - 78
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- 15 Aug 2024
- 06 Mar 2025
- 05 Jun 2026
Abstract
In this paper, I argue that the auxiliary-like preverbal lai ‘come,’ which frequently appears before purposives in Mandarin Chinese, is actually a light verb located in the v position. The current light v analysis incorporates aspects of previous analyses of bare and gei purposives while providing a simpler explanation for relevant phenomena. Additionally, the proposal bolsters the argument that gei in the post-object gei phrase in various constructions is a verb (e.g., Lin & Huang 2015). The results of an empirical survey testing speaker judgments of sentences with lai and its antonym qu ‘go’ confirm the prediction that lai is a light verb that can appear in possible light v positions across sentences. Some differences in acceptance rates and preferences for lai or qu may be due to the bleached semantic content of lai and qu, frequency of usage, and processing difficulties arising from reference ambiguity.