American International Journal of Social Science

Diachronic Verb Movements in Chinese
Ke Zou

Abstract
There occurred two verb movements in the development of Modern Chinese. One preposes a verb signifying the direction of a displacement motion or action denoted by the main verb, and the other preposes a verb clarifying the direction of such displacement with respect to the speaker's position. Given the properties of the main verb and the two directional verbs, a natural way to accommodate them is to project three VPs with the three verbs as heads and render their semantic relation as verb-complementation relation between the main verb and the VP headed by the first directional verb, and between the first directional verb and the VP headed by the second directional verb. Under this analysis, the two diachronic verb movements can be simply captured by verb-raising and NP-movement.

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