Demonstrates how variations in Mandarin interactions can be explained through established linguistic phenomena.
In Mandarin, agent and theme arguments occur in complementary distribution with so-called “non-canonical” arguments (NCAs) that realize oblique thematic roles (Li 2014, Lin 2001). In this paper, we demonstrate that such alternations can be derived naturally from a combination of independent and cross-linguistically well-established phenomena, including (non-)recursive applicative heads (Nie 2020) and anti-agentivity (Martin et al. 2023).
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Hopperdietzel et al. (2026) studied this question.
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