Morphosyntactic properties of finiteness and control in Mandarin and beyond

Abstract

This thesis argues for the existence of finiteness distinction in Mandarin Chinese by providing a new structure for control clauses. Finiteness in Mandarin Chinese is manifested as perspective-anchoring: a finite, noncontrol construction possesses a perspective phrase (PerspP) projected in the left periphery, whereas a nonfinite, control construction lacks this projection. Empirical evidence is observed from the long-distance reference of an anaphoric element ziji ‘self’: a controlled PRO cannot be an antecedent of ziji in long-distance reference, while a free subject in a noncontrol clause can. The previous literature (e.g., Lin 2015, Zhang 2019, etc.) argues that a control clause cannot embed certain aspect markers, sentence-final particles, or future-oriented modals, etc., such as the perfective le, the sentence-final le, and the future-oriented hui. This thesis, however, concludes that the incompatibility of most aforementioned elements under control verbs is due to semantic conflicts, not syntactic distinctions: past-oriented aspect markers and SFPs are not allowed in the complements of future-oriented control verbs; the epistemic hui requires an information state to quantify over, which is not available under non-representational control verbs. This thesis rejects the proposal that the blocking effect of ziji is due to person agreement (Giblin 2015; Miyagawa 2017, etc.) and sides with perspective conflicts (Huang & Liu 2001; Charnavel 2019, etc.) albeit with a different approach: a long-distance ziji is neither a bound variable nor a perspectival anaphor (Sundaresan 2018), but an indexical distinct from Anand’s (2006) indexical-shift analysis. This thesis further argues that a long-distance ziji is an indexical of perspectives, and the specifier of a PerspP assigns a perspective of contexts. This thesis proposes that a PerspP is a phase, which accounts for the different locality effects between control and noncontrol constructions: a control clause permits long-distance object preposing, while a noncontrol clause forbids it. Other morphosyntactic properties, such as aspect lowering (Grano 2015, Huang 2018, etc.) and speaker-oriented adverbs (Zhang 2019), have incorrect predictions and thus are excluded from the discussion of this thesis.