UC Santa Cruz

This paper discusses new constraints on argument structure in Mandarin which provides evidence for the constructivist approach. Mandarin has enriched non-canonical arguments. In generic sentences, it even tolerates argument reversal. Lin (2001) proposes the free combination of light verbs to explain this liberality. This paper shows that argument reversal is restricted to an environment of genericity and is incompatible with viewpoint aspects. Such a requirement suggests that the restriction of argument structure is not limited to the lexical properties of verbs and light verbs but also involves wider and more structural domains like genericity and aspects.

We propose a causal approach to the operator that licenses the proper subject semantically. Even for a low thematic role like THEME, if in generics it owns high enough typicality or causal power to typically ‘cause’ the property of the following predicate, it can be reconsidered as a CAUSER and therefore take the subject position. This analysis can also explain the argument reversal in causative-resultatives and may shed light on the research of more non-canonical arguments cross-linguistically.