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Volume 24, Issue 4
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Abstract

Abstract

This paper revisits a well-established areal phenomenon in Mainland Southeast Asia and Northern Europe involving an element, ACQ(UIRE), that functions as a lexical verb meaning ‘to get or acquire’ and appears, as a functional item, in numerous seemingly unrelated constructions such as modal constructions, resultatives, descriptive complementation, and focus constructions. This paper presents a generative framework for the postverbal ACQ-structures in Hong Kong Cantonese involving the marker . The proposed framework takes into account four readings of postverbal ACQ-sentences, namely potential, permission, descriptive, and focus, and argues that all postverbal ACQ-structures in Cantonese share the same basic configuration in which the ACQ heads a P-internal ModP which expresses possibility modality and selects a small clause XP. The postverbal ACQ takes an AspP as complement which indicates the (non-)realization of the projected endpoint. The interpretational difference and other structural variations are boiled down to the three parameters realized in featural terms as: [±Realised] on Asp0, [±Possibility] and [±Deontic] on Mod0. The analysis also provides an explanation for several long-standing issues, including the verb-copying phenomenon, the co-occurrence of with the modal auxiliary , the distribution of the A-not-A form and negation, and the across-the-board aspectual incompatibility in postverbal ACQ-structures. The parametric framework demonstrates how apparently unrelated ACQ-constructions are closely connected with each other and provide a testable model to account for cross-linguistic variation found in other ACQ languages.

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2023-09-14
2024-10-03

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Rethinking postverbal ‘acquire’ and related constructions in Cantonese
Language and Linguistics 24, 674 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.00143.chi
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): ACQ(UIRE); featural parameters; focus; possibility modality; realization; small clause

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