JUSTIFYING PART-OF-SPEECH ASSIGNMENTS FOR MANDARIN GEI
One-Soon HER
Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan 116, R.O.C. osh@nccu.edu.tw 886-2-926142388 (mobile) 996-2-29387466 (fax)
1. INTRODUCTION Some of the most controversial issues in Chinese syntax involve basic part-ofspeech assignments, often for some of the most frequently occurring lexical items in the language. For example, are ba and bei case markers, prepositions, verbs, or something else all together (cf., Her, 1989; Ting, 1998; Sybesma, 1999; Bender, 2000) Does Chinese have adjectives or should they simply be treated as subcategories of verbs; likewise, are there prepositions in the language or should they be viewed as verbs (cf., McCawley, 1992) The list goes on. This paper deals with the controversies surrounding the part-of-speech assignments of multifunctional gei in Mandarin Chinese. One of the consequences of the issues of gei relates to dative alternations. While a common syntactic phenomenon cross-linguistically, dative alternations would be non-existent in Chinese if the postobject gei in (1) could only be a verb, just like the verb gei in (2), as initially proposed in Chao (1968) and later argued for in Huang and Mo (1992) and Huang and Ahrens (1999). (1) Lisi xie-le yi feng xin gei ta.1 Lee write-ASP one CL letter GEI she 'Lee wrote a letter to her.' (2) Lisi gei-le ta yi feng xin. Lee give-ASP she one CL letter 'Lee gave her a letter.' This paper will demonstrate that the postobject gei in (1) can be a verb as well as a preposition and that this gei-NP in fact also appears preverbally. In addition to the verbal gei and the prepositional gei, the verb gei as the head in the V-gei compounds and gei as a complementizer in the purposive clause are also argued for. These five different constructions are illustrated and named in (3a-e) and exemplified in (4a-e) respectively. (3) Five constructions of gei in Mandarin a. verbal: [gei NP2 NP1] b. postobject: [V NP1 gei NP2] c. postverbal: [V-gei NP2 NP1] d. preverbal: [gei NP2 V NP1] e. purposive: [V NP gei NP VP] (4) a. Lisi gei-le ta yi feng xin. Lee give-ASP she one CL letter 'Lee gave her a letter.'

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