Towards a Morphosyntactic Analysis of Mandarin Mood/Aspect Marker ge

This paper provides a novel descriptive and theoretical account for the ‘down-play’ mood marker ge in Mandarin Chinese. One essential property that is not covered by previous studies is its clitic status. Incorporating and enhancing Yang’s (2001) clitic treatment of numeral-less classifiers, I propose a morphosyntactic analysis that identifies the morphological-template for the mood marker ge − [VP V-(Xσ)-ge-YP[+N]]. It is shown that this template is quite similar to the morphological template for internal affixes like -dein Chinese. These findings suggest an updated treatment of clitics as ‘phrasal affixes’ (Klavans 1982, 1985, Anderson 1992, 2005). Furthermore, it supports Aronoff’s (1994) treatment of morphology as an independent component in grammar, and Chomsky’s (2000 et seq.) Agree framework, which allows syntactic operations to apply before morphological operations.