New perspectives on Chinese syntax by Waltraud Paul (review)

Mandarin Chinese, as an isolating language, presents considerable challenges to the syntactic study of word-order typology, the inventory of lexical categories, sentence-peripheral elements like topic, sentence-final particles (SFPs), and so on. Waltraud Paul’s book New perspectives on Chinese syntax boldly takes on these controversial and recalcitrant issues and aims to reaccommodate them into a broader linguistic landscape. In short, P has managed to reconcile some noisy facts in Chinese and has cogently falsified some pervasive, long-term conceptions in Chinese syntax.

The book is organized into eight chapters. The first chapter sets the stage for the book and provides a synopsis of the subsequent chapters. In Ch. 2, word order in Chinese is submitted to typological scrutiny from a historical perspective. Chinese is argued to have undergone two major word-order changes: OV > VO > OV (see Li & Thompson 1974). Specifically, pre-Archaic Chinese originated as an SOV language and then changed to SVO between the tenth and the third centuries bc, further followed by a shift back to SOV, which is still in progress in Modern Mandarin. P argues against this and, based on the Shang inscriptions (see Djamouri 1988), shows that even in pre-Archaic Chinese, the dominant word order is SVO instead of SOV. The so-called SOV in pre-Archaic Chinese, involving focalization of the object and object pronouns in negated sentences, turns out to be de facto the head-complement configuration, thus consistent with the SVO order. The core evidence for Li and Thompson’s (1974) hypothesis of SOV order in Modern Chinese is the bǎ-construction. P succeeds in reconciling the bǎ-construction with the head-complement configuration. She assumes bǎ to be a higher functional head subcategorizing a vP or AspP as complement, rather than a preposition. Importantly, P further postulates that the object of V moves to [Spec, bǎP] and bǎ head-moves to the higher v (leaving aside many details). Consequently, the complement of bǎ is now to its right in Modern Mandarin, a compliant VO order. Hence, Chinese is systematically an SVO language.

The following three chapters concern a number of lexical categories in Chinese. It has been claimed that Chinese, an isolating language, lacks these categories. Ch. 3 probes the properties of prepositions and argues that prepositions form an independent category distinct from verbs, rather than the alleged categorially dual V/P hybrid (see Huang et al. 2009). The evidence P provides is as follows. First, a preposition is distinct from a verb in terms of syntactic distribution. Prepositions are incompatible with adverbs and negation, contra typical verbs, regardless of whether there is a homophonous verbal counterpart. Second, prepositions cannot function as predicates. Verbs and prepositions that are homophonous display different selectional restrictions, and only the former is compatible with aspectual affixes, which argues against the conflation of the two. Third, no preposition stranding is allowed, even in the Shang inscriptions, whereas verbs do license null complements. Finally, diachronically, not all prepositions have verbal origins. For instance, exclusive prepositions such as zì ‘from’ and yú ‘at, to’ are attested in the Shang inscriptions; there is no evidence to suggest that they are deverbal. The argument for the preposition as an independent syntactic category is further supported by the observation that PPs pattern with NPs, rather than VPs, given that PPs also show adjunct/argument asymmetry, akin to NPs.

In a similar vein, Ch. 4 primarily argues for postpositions as an independent adpositional category. P first argues against the conflation of postpositions with nouns. Unlike nouns, the postposition requires an overt complement (e.g. *(zhuōzi) shàng ‘on the table’), and no intervention is allowed between them. The existence of deverbal postpositions (e.g. lái ‘during, over’, qǐ ‘starting from’) substantially undermines the nominal analysis of postpositions. The postposition is also distributionally different from the preposition. In contrast with prepositions, argumental spatial postpositions can be the subjects...