Light Verb Construction as a Case of Remnant Movement
نویسنده
چکیده
In this paper, based on Chinese data, I propose that the so called light verb construction can be subsumed under the analysis of internal topicalization, following the analysis of remnant movement. First, I argue that a light verb does assign theta-roles. Second, I argue that all the particular syntactic behaviors observed in Grimshaw and Mester (1988) the verbal noun cannot undergo topicalization, passivization or dislocation in a cleft construction are in fact the consequence of violating the constraint on remnant movement. With this new proposal, we do not need a special mechanism of transferring theta-roles from the VN to the arguments at the sentence level for the light verb construction, as proposed by Grismshaw and Mester (1988) or Saito and Hoshi (2000).
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