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Reanalysis of semantically required adjuncts as complements in the Chinese ba-construction

The paper deals with the syntax-semantics interface in the Chinese ba-construction. The ba-construction is a partially productive clausal pattern that is associated with a number of semantic and syntactic constraints. In this paper, I show how the semantics of the lexical instantiation of the construction can impose additional constraints on its syntactic form. The paper is mainly concerned with two theoretical issues: on the one hand, ba is analyzed as a head that selects a verb and may also determine the requirements on dependents of this verb, which requires a nonlocal selection mechanism. On the other hand, the nonlocal selection process has a specific consequence for the complement / adjunct status of these dependents: whereas they are adjuncts at the level of the lexical verb, they are reanalyzed as obligatory complements at the level of the clausal head ba. This status switch is modelled with the extended argument structure approach proposed by Bouma et al. (2001). The paper is structured as follows: first, I describe the basic form and semantics of the ba-construction. I concentrate on the verbal domain in the construction and show that the two proposed structural motivations for additional dependents to the verb (Li, 1990; Feng, 2001) do not explain the interaction between the semantics of main verb and the requirement of additional verbal dependents. The following analysis takes ba as a head that selects a transitive verbal complement, attracts its NP arguments and, in case of a semantic mismatch, also attracts the other dependents of the verb in order to satisfy the relational constraints associated with ba.