A Radical Construction Grammar analysis of Mandarin Chinese SOV sentences

TL;DRAbstract

This paper discusses, from a Radical Construction Grammar perspective (Croft 2001), sim ple Mandarin Chinese SOV sentences, using terminology developed by Mel’cuk (2001) to account for the Semantic-Communicative Structure of sentences. It is argued here, contrary to what is traditionally thought, that there are three SOV constructions instead of one, namely: (i) bare SOV constructions, (ii) SOV-le constructions, and (iii) SOV-guo constructions, all of which encode Foregrounded Direct Objects. Of the three, only the bare SOV construction is inherently contrastive, and only the SOV-le construction encodes Foregrounded Verbs as well as Foregrounded Direct Objects. In addition, it is shown that the three SOV constructions are different from SVO and OSV constructions in that the Subject or the Direct Object can be a Rhematic Focus in the two latter constructions (i.e., they can be the unknown element in a question-answer sequence), but not in the latter one. The fact that the meaning associ

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