Justifying Part-of-speech Assignments for Mandarin Gei

Abstract

This paper justifies the different part-of-speech assignments for Mandarin gei in five of its different uses: verbal, preverbal, postverbal, postobject, and purposive, and challenges the unified verbal analysis of preverbal, postobject, and purposive gei. In spite of the grammaticality of postobject verb gei in a serial verb construction, the prepositional dative in Mandarin involves precisely the preposition gei, either in its postobject position or preverbally. The affixal analysis of postverbal gei is refuted, as gei is in fact the verb head in V-gei compounding. The analysis of gei as a complementizer in purposive clauses is endorsed. Finally, I discuss the generality of the analyses put forth and also provide more supporting evidence from historical developments.