Proceedings of the LFG06 Conference

In this paper, we examine the phenomenon of Preposition Incorporation (PI) in modern Mandarin. While the category PP is found in various positions within the clause, it is never found with VP. Instead, the P ‘incorporates ’ into V, or else is absent. We argue that previous generative approaches have failed to provide a simple and consistent explanation which applies to all types of verbs. We propose an OT analysis in which a given argument structure has different potential surface ex-pressions, with interacting constraints to give the correct range of actual output forms. The constraints are of the familiar types: markedness, in particular, that the VP-internal structure be maximally sim-ple, and faithfulness, in particular, that any non-core GFs are ‘marked ’ by the presence of a P. Further, our analysis extends to different classes of ditransitive verbs; the ‘put ’ class has a very limited range of surface expressions, a subset of those available to the ‘send ’ class. 1