Events and the Headed Aspectual Structure: The Syntax-Lexicon Interface

Abstract

Extending the headed aspectual structure proposed by Li (1993) to the lexical decomposition of an eventive verb, I propose a model of mapping from lexicon to syntax where the event starts its life as two distinctively defined subevents, Asp(ectual)-head and Asp(ectual)-complement, which are directly reflected in two layers of verbal constituency structure, i.e., small vP and Verbal nucleus Phrase (VnP). It turns out that this model successfully explains away the notorious syntax-semantics mismatch in Chinese without creating the same troubles as Huang's (1993, 1994) analysis would.