Generative Syntactic Analysis of Postverbal Adverbs in Southeastern Chinese Dialects
In Mandarin Chinese,adverbs typically precede the verb,while in southeastern dialects such as Wu and Cantonese,they are postverbal.Although previous studies have explored this phenomenon from traditional grammar,typology,semantics,and pragmatics perspectives,systematic generative syntactic analyses are relatively scarce.The VP-shell hypothesis in generative syntax provides a new theoretical perspective,offering a systematic explanation for the syntactic mechanism of postverbal adverbs in dialects and their syntactic differences from preverbal adverbs in Mandarin.According to this theory,postverbal adverbs in dialects can be viewed as strictly VP adverbs,with their syntactic position fixed within the VP layer;meanwhile,preverbal adverbs in Mandarin function as strictly vP adverbs,with their syntactic position higher in the vP layer.This distinction not only clarifies the distributional characteristics of adverbs in different varieties of Chinese,but also provides a generative syntactic framework for understanding word order variation,further enriching the explanatory and predictive power of grammatical theories in real-world language use.
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