In this paper, we build on Song (2018) and undertake a comparative study of the syntactic behavior of verb-resultative (V-R) compounds in three Chinese varieties: Standard Mandarin, Dongying Mandarin, and Wenzhou Wu. They systematically differ from each other in whether they require an obligatory post-V-R morpheme and, if they do, whether the choice of that morpheme is a purely grammatical issue. We find that while both Dongying Mandarin and Wenzhou Wu require a post-V-R morpheme (whereas Standard Mandarin does not), they sharply differ in the choice of said morpheme. We attribute this cross-dialectal variation to the way Chinese varieties telicize their resultative compounds and propose an analysis based on root syntax. After laying out our analysis, which is an extension of the analysis in Song (2018), we further discuss the parameterization of the three-way variation, arguing for a parameter hierarchy-based model over a flat model.
1. Introduction
2. Data
3. Analysis
4. Parameterization
5. Conclusion
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