VP Ellipsis Correlatives in Mandarin Chinese

[[abstract]]This paper proposes a syntactic account for the licensing condition and semantic requirement of VP ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese. I argue that Chinese VP ellipsis are four constructions related, i.e. ye-shi, ye-you, mei-you, and ye-modal. It is found that the constructions involving VP ellipsis can be captured under a hierarchy of the projection TopP>FocP>(AspP)/(ModP)>VP. The subject in the target conjunct is a contrastive topic (Hole 2004) while the preverbal adverbs ye is a contrastive focus (Rooth 1992, Tsai 2001) occupying the specifier of FP with respect to its focused nature. Aspect phrase and Modal phrase are brought up to trigger the head movement and satisfy the focus criterion (Brody 1990, Kiss 1998). Under the feature-checking mechanism, the subject and the focus element are merged to eliminate the [Topic] and [Focus] feature respectively. The proposed VP ellipsis constructions satisfy the e-Givenness condition (Merchant 2001), a requirement that deleted phrases express semantic entailment information.[[fileno]]204_JA07_2008_v4_p73[[department]]語言學研究