Abstract In this paper, I argue that the auxiliary-like preverbal lai ‘come,’ which frequently appears before purposives in Mandarin Chinese, is actually a light verb located in the v position. The current light v analysis incorporates aspects of previous analyses of bare and gei purposives while providing a simpler explanation for relevant phenomena. Additionally, the proposal bolsters the argument that gei in the post-object gei phrase in various constructions is a verb (e.g., Lin & Huang 2015 ). The results of an empirical survey testing speaker judgments of sentences with lai and its antonym qu ‘go’ confirm the prediction that lai is a light verb that can appear in possible light v positions across sentences. Some differences in acceptance rates and preferences for lai or qu may be due to the bleached semantic content of lai and qu , frequency of usage, and processing difficulties arising from reference ambiguity.
Pei-Jung Kuo (Fri,) studied this question.
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