The Invertible Construction in Chinese

The Invertible Construction in Chinese Yan Cong Dept. of Chinese and Bilingual Studies Hong Kong Polytechnic University stella.cong@polyu.edu.hk Chu-Ren Huang Dept. of Chinese and Bilingual Studies Hong Kong Polytechnic University churen.huang@polyu.edu.hk Lian-Hee Wee Dept. of English Language and Literature Hong Kong Baptist University lianhee@hkbu.edu.hk ABSTRACT This paper argues that the Invertible Construction (IC) in Chinese is a kind of distributive construction. What appears to be an inversion of word order is best understood as the division of the theme NP to be acted upon by a number of agents for an embedded event. This analysis best captures a number of otherwise intractable properties of the IC including the necessarily quantitative interpretation of the NPs and the incompatibility with adverbs of volition. 1 Introduction The paper revisits the so-called Invertible Construction in Chinese (henceforth IC); see also (Li & Thompson, 1981:377-395; Li, 1996, 1998; Wee, 2008). Among them, one highly relevant work was a semantic constraint oriented Constructional Grammar account for the IC in Chinese (Huang et al., 1999). Adopting an LFG framework, this paper offers an arguably more comprehensive account of IC through mapping an event structure containing three participants to a dyadic argument structure, thereby producing IC’s signature inversion effect as well as other characteristics that otherwise appear to be unrelated. Traditionally, the IC, or the Flip-flop construction has been described as having the canonical NP1 V NP2 being inverted to produce NP2 V NP1, (1). (1) Invertible Construction in Chinese (IC) NP1 V NP2  NP2 V NP1 a. 八个人吃三碗饭 ba-ge-ren chi san-wan-fan 8-CL-person eat 3-CL-rice Eight people to eat three bowls of rice b. 三碗饭吃八个人 san-wan-fan chi ba-ge-ren 3-CL-rice eat 8-CL-person Three bowls of rice to eat eight people In (1a, b), the English glosses are provided in the infinitive since the Chinese expression is neutral with regard to the specification of tense and aspect. We shall continue to do so throughout the rest of this paper to maintain a faithful translation to the original language’s grammar rather than the literary content. The sentence in (1a) has the canonical order of the noun phrases in terms of agenthood and patienthood. In contrast, (1b) is “inverted” or “flip-flopped”. The “inverted” form (1b) is more marked than (1a) in that speakers are sometimes stunned by the apparently weird interpretation of the rice being human-eaters before they draw upon the intended reading1. It should however be noted that the markedness of (1b) is not due to ungrammaticality, as will be evident when compared with the anomalous reading of (2b) below. (2) Non-invertability a. 八个人砸三只碗 ba-ge-ren za san-zhi-wan 8-CL-person break 3-CL-bowls Eight people to break three bowls b. * 三只碗砸八个人 san-zhi-wan za ba-ge-ren 3-CL-bowls break 8-CL-person 1 Note that any possible metaphorical inferences derived from (1b) are excluded from this paper. The present study is confined to the grammatical content of data. PACLIC 29 206 29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation pages 206 - 211 Shanghai, China, October 30 - November 1, 2015 Copyright 2015 by Cong Yan, …

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