Postverbal Constituents in Mandarin Chinese

This paper discusses some previous structural and non-structural accounts of postverbal constituents in Mandarin Chinese and argues for an approach that attaches importance to both structure and non-structural factors like iconicity and information structure, an approach that offers a rather neat and natural account of postverbal constituents in Chinese. The paper also argues that all sentences containing one and only one postverbal duration or frequency phrase should be analyzed as involving a clause that contains both the duration/frequency phrase and the relevant verb except when only the action expressed by the verb is negated. As for sentences that contain two or more postverbal duration/frequency phrases in a row, they involve at least two clauses.