The Syntactic Status of NP in Vi+NP
Yongzhong Yang · Yuyan yanjiu · 2007
It is argued that the NP in Chinese Vi+NP constructions should not be treated as a semantic object, nor should it be considered as a nonfinite complement. It is a syntactic object Based on the hypothesis that the NP is syntactically dualistic, the paper proposes a new model of analysis - Null Predicate Hypothesis, namely, the Vi-NP entails a null argument and a null predicate. The Vt+NP and Vi+NP patterns are actually based on the same structure. The NP in the former is both semantically and syntactically governed by the V while the NP in the latter only syntactically governed by the V. As the syntactic object, the NP in Vi+NP cannot be projected as DP, otherwise the sentence containing Vi+NP would be ungrammatical.