Abstract This paper motivates a hierarchical, size-based view of finiteness in languages without inflectional morphology, such as Chinese. Drawing on an array of crossclausal dependencies of ‘again’-type and aspectual elements in Mandarin and Cantonese, we argue that finiteness distinction is best understood as properties arising from clause size differences rather than a simple featural distinction. Empirically, Mandarin preverbal you ‘again’ and Cantonese postverbal -faan ‘again’ exhibit exceptional scopal behavior, which is not found with other Chinese ‘again’-type elements that are lower than the outer aspect. This behavior is possible only across nonfinite clauses with a size smaller than TP (i.e., vP), resembling restructuring crosslinguistically. Adopting the split aspect approach and a hierarchy of complement clause sizes, we propose that you and -faan move to and agree with an outer AspP above vP, respectively. The locality constraint stems from intervention by the outer AspP in the complement clause, which is present in larger nonfinite clauses such as TPs in addition to full-fledged finite CPs. Furthermore, we argue that the minimal size of nonfinite clauses is vP, which contains an inner AspP and blocks restructuring-like patterns with inner aspectual elements. Our findings uncover a fine-grained cartography of ‘again’-type elements and aspectual elements in Chinese languages on the one hand and support a gradient distinction in finiteness marked by complement size over an all-or-nothing dichotomy on the other.
Liu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.