J. Lin (2010) argues against Sybesma's (2007) proposal that Mandarin Chinese has syntactic tense and contends that it does not need tense for the temporal interpretations of sentences. This paper shows that those arguments cannot be sustained. Specifically, this paper points out the following: (i) Lin's claim that Mandarin Chinese sentences do not show tenserelated syntactic properties is wrong. (ii) The so-called nonexistent temporal interpretations of Mandarin Chinese sentences are merely a matter of choice of the reference time. (iii) Lin's argument against the existence of past tense in Mandarin Chinese is committed to the error of taking the English past tense as the only model for the tense system of Mandarin Chinese. (iv) The parallelism between Dutch and Mandarin Chinese that Sybesma observes is temporal in nature, despite the objections of Lin. (v) The temporal interpretations of Mandarin Chinese sentences can be accounted for straightforwardly by a pronominal tense system. I am grateful to Katherine Hsiao and the participants of my syntax seminars at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, for valuable comments and suggestions. I am also thankful to Tomohiro Fujii for help with the Japanese data. I am responsible for any remaining error.

This paper investigates ''gapless'' bei passives in Mandarin Chinese and the way they are licensed. It is discovered that if the embedded predicate of a bei passive contains a weak NP, then the bei passive can be gapless. The proposal of this paper is that the weak NP introduces a variable, which can be bound by the operator Op at the embedded IP. Op need not move from an argument position in the embedded predicate of the bei passive; it can be merged directly to the embedded IP and bind the variable introduced by the weak NP.

This paper investigates three constructions in Mandarin, all of which convey a purposive/teleological meaning, including the lai purposive, the hao purposive, and the bare purposive. Despite the fact that each type of purposive clause in Mandarin occurs at the right edge of a sentence, it is argued that none of the purposive clause is a genuine right adjunct in the underlying syntactic structure. On the other hand, our analysis shows that the lai purposive employs complementation of a secondary predicate, the hao purposive involves conjunction of two clauses, and the bare purposive should be analyzed as left adjunction that is stranded in the right edge after verb movement. The evidence for our analysis is drawn from subject and object gaps, the ba-construction in Mandarin, agentivity, and linear ordering of multiple purposive clauses. This work thus demonstrates representative cases where a structure that appears to involve right adjunction may in fact employ no right adjunction at all. The conclusion is thus consistent with the prediction of Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA).

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Abstract.  This paper argues that Mandarin Chinese clauses exhibit the finite/nonfinite contrast, and, based on this discovery, shows that the EPP is the driving force for A‐movement. The evidence is the raising of arguments from the TP complements of different kinds of modals. It is argued that the epistemic modals in Mandarin Chinese take a finite TP complement, whereas the modal hui‘will’ and the root modals take a nonfinite TP complement. Though the epistemic modals take a finite TP complement, they nonetheless permit subject‐to‐subject raising. This phenomenon can be accounted for if we assume that the EPP drives A‐movement, and agreement blocks it. Mandarin Chinese does not have grammatical features; as a consequence, the subject of a finite clause does not perform checking of grammatical features, and thus is free to raise. This phenomenon, therefore, is evidence against the checking‐based theory of A‐movement. If feature checking is involved in raising in Mandarin Chinese sentences, extra assumptions must be made, with a heavy burden of proof on the checking‐based theory.