THE SYNTAX OF THE CHINESE BA CONSTRUCTION

This paper offers a morphosyntactic analysis of the Chinese BA constru ction: (a) BA is the head of a functional category and selects an aspe ct or Particle phrase as its complement; (b) the aspect and particle p hrases are functional categories too and their heads select a VP as th eir complement; and (c) the preverbal and postverbal NPs form a single noun phrase at D-structure. Under this analysis the BA construction i s simply derived by NP-movement and verb-raising. NP-movement is force d by the ban against BA-stranding, and verb-raising is driven by the m orphological requirement that both aspect marker and particle need a v erb host. As a consequence of this analysis, the possessive and partit ive relations between preverbal NP and postverbal NP are captured by t he spec-head and head-complement relations under X' theory. Other cons equences of this analysis are that it leads to principled accounts of selectional restriction, functional interpretation of preverbal NPs, a nd the presence of specificity effects in the BA construction.