A DM Analysis of Simple and Complex V-O Compounds in Mandarin Chinese

This paper proposes a unified account of simple and complex V-O compounds in Mandarin Chinese within the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM; Halle and Marantz 1993, 1994). It is argued that the derivations of the two types of compound differ in the absence or presence of the categoriser n when two compound roots are merged. The simple V-O compounds involve direct merger of two roots, while the additional categoriser n in the case of complex V-O compounds categorises one of the compound roots as a noun, which triggers part of a series of iterated X°-movement, resulting in a linear order of compound roots different from that observed in simple V-O compounds. The present analysis constitutes empirical support to root merger as a narrow-syntactic operation (Zhang 2007; Bauke 2014, 2016), and more generally to the commonplace DM assumption that roots are acategorial.