Using Self-paced Reading to Test the Syntactic Structure of Serial Verbs in Mandarin Chinese

The structure of Mandarin serial verb constructions (SVCs) is debated in the theoretical linguistic literature. One camp of researchers argues for a mono-clausal analysis, where the two serial verbs act as one unit, while others propose a bi-clausal and two unit structure. This paper weighs in on that debate and reports the findings of an experiment designed to compare Mandarin serial verbs with one-unit bi-syllabic verbs and two-unit infinitive-type verbs. The results show that there is a garden path effect, shown with an increased reading time after disambiguating, for bi-syllabic verbs constructions and SCVs, but no garden path effect for infinitive-type constructions. This pattern of results suggests that Mandarin speakers process serial verbs as one unit, similar to bi-syllabic verbs, and lends support to the mono-clausal analysis