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On parts of speech in Chinese: gen

Abstract In preverbal position in Mandarin Chinese the morpheme gen sometimes presents strict distributional characteristics, sometimes not. In the first case, it can be either a preposition, equivalent to the comitative marker ‘with’ in English or a conjunction, equivalent to ‘and’. In the second case, it evidences a mixed distribution, partaking of both preposition and conjunctive features. In this paper, gen is treated as an underspecified marker whose values can be predicted from its syntactic behavior and from the types of predicates it is in construction with. It is shown that when it presents mixed distributional characteristics, gen can only be in construction with collective predicates. The semantic features associated with such predicates, which are [+/–eventive], are [+symmetry], hence [–distributivity].