The syntax of “give” constructions in Mandarin and Teochew

Project title: The syntax of “give” constructions in Mandarin and Teochew

• Crosslinguistically, the verb “give” in many languages can assume various uses, and Chinese is one of such languages. In Chinese linguistics, “give”, especially the Mandarin gei, has been widely discussed in different varieties of Chinese languages. In Mandarin, gei was found to contain multiple properties and functions as various categories under different structures, ranging from a lexical verb, auxiliary, preposition, to an affix and so on, which causes most controversies and debates in the scholarship. Thus, this paper will discuss the major proposals in the literature and propose a unified account of the grammatical categories and derivations of gei constructions in Mandarin. More importantly, this paper, with the nature of linguistic fieldwork, will compare the “give” constructions between Mandarin (i.e., gei) and Chenghai Teochew (i.e., khəʔ), a variety of Chinese languages.

• Teochew is also called Chiuchow or Chaoshanhua, which is a Min language spoken by people living in the Chaoshan regions of eastern Guangdong province in China. It is also spoken by some people from Singapore, Thai, Malaysia, Vietnam and other southeast Asian countries, so there are certain Teochew varieties. Even within Chaoshan regions, Teochew varies across different cities (e.g., Jieyang Teochew, Chaoyang Teochew). Some Teochew varieties have been explored in linguistics fieldwork (e.g., Peng, 2012; Yeo, 2011), and this paper will specifically focus on a relatively underexplored type of Teochew, namely the Chenghai Teochew.

• This project provides an introduction to the Teochew languages and an analysis of the positions of “give” in Teochew and Mandarin, with a discussion of four major proposals with respect to the grammatical categories of “gei” and “khəʔ”. I also discussed the major functions of “give” constructions such as the causative-permissive, passive and unaccusative constructions in Teochew and Mandarin.