Raising or Lowering?—A Case Study of Alethic ACQ in Chinese and Southeast Asian Languages

Studies in Chinese Linguistics

Yi Zhao-Hui¹  Xiong Jian-Guo²  Cheng Gong³ 

[1] Department of Asian Languages, Luoyang University of Foreign Languages;Department of Language Engineering, Luoyang University of Foreign Languages;School of International Studies, Zhejiang University;

关键词: alethic acq;    distributed morphology;    lowering;    raising;    chinese;    southeast asian languages;   

DOI  :  10.1515/scl-2016-0004

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

The present paper proposes a morphological lowering analysis for the structure associated with alethic ACQ, a postverbal morpheme capable of denoting the modality of ability and possibility in Chinese as well as many Southeast Asian languages. Built in the framework of distributed morphology, we suggest that ACQ is base-generated in a preverbal node as a modal element and lowers to a postverbal position during its derivation on the PF branch. We compare and contrast the proposed lowering account with the other model of analysis, the raising analysis, and demonstrate that the lowering account is superior both conceptually and empirically.

【 授权许可】

Unknown