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Structural head and aspectuality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Yafei Li
Yafei Li*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
*
Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Morrill Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701
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Abstract

Though both Chinese and Japanese allow resultative compounds of the form Vcause-Vresult, Japanese resultative compounds do not show the semantic ambiguities that their Chinese counterparts have. I argue that this difference results from the interaction of three factors. First, resultative compounds are morphologically head-initial in Chinese but head-final in Japanese. Secondly, resultative compounds are also associated with an event structure whose head is always represented by Vcause of the compound. Thirdly, a universal condition requiring iconic representation of the temporal relations between two subevents makes Vcause linearly precede Vresult. The result of this work supports the claim that many differences among languages can be accounted for with universal principles plus simple parametric variations.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 69 , Issue 3 , September 1993 , pp. 480 - 504
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

I thank Wayne Harbert, Magui Suñer, Sarah Thomason, John Whitman, the students of my Argument Structure Seminar in Fall, 1991, and the audiences of the Cornell Linguistics Workshop and the UC Irvine Workshop on East Asian Linguistics for valuable comments. Unless noted otherwise, the Japanese data are provided by Chioko Takahashi. I am also grateful to three reviewers, whose comments have helped make my arguments more explicit and precise.

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