Abstracts Category : Other

Verb Doubling in Chinese

by Qiuyue Zhong

The present thesis aims to discuss verb doubling phenomenon in Chinese.First, I offer doubling phenomenon in languages, which shows that doubling phenomenon is observed in different languages and in different domains. Then, I review the definition of syntactic doubling in Barbiers (2008). I define verb doubling by adjusting this definition: a lexical verb is expressed phonologically twice. I focus on Chinese data in this dissertation. The verb doubling patterns in this language is grouped into non-cleft ones and verb doubling cleft.Second, I present general descriptions of different non-cleft verb doubling patterns in Chinese. These observations demonstrate that verb doubling phenomenon may be relevant to many aspects like topic/focus, delimitative aspect, polarity, presupposition and maximality. The discussions on these expressions concentrate on questions like what kinds of elements may undergo doubling in these patterns, in which situations these expressions appear, what are the similarities among different doubling patterns, etc.Third, I offer an analysis on verb doubling cleft (VDC) in Chinese. FollowingCheng and Vicente (2013), I claim that in VDC expressions the doubled verb undergoes A movement to [Spec, TopP] through intermediate projections. Besides, the doubling effect is caused by the failure of chain reduction. I assume that the double element fuses with an aspect head based on Cinques (1999) hierarchy of functional projections.Advisors/Committee Members: [emailprotected] (authoremail), true (authoremailshow), Gallego, ngel J. (director), true (authorsendemail).