Verb-Copying Resultatives in Colloquial Singapore English
- Tamisha Tan, University of Cambridge
- Old Medical School G.152, University of Edinburgh
Verb-Copying Resultatives (VCR) refer to a construction where sentences containing both a direct object and post-verbal result predicate show two instantiations of the main verb. While significant research has been conducted on Mandarin and Taiwanese VCRs, this work provides the first-ever account of VCRs in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE): (1) He eat rice eat full already ‘He has become full from eating rice’ (2) He wash clothes wash clean already ‘The clothes have become clean from his washing them’. This work proposes a syntactic structure of VCRs within the Copy Theory of Movement (Chomsky, 1993), where multiple copy spell-out is facilitated by morphological fusion (Nunes, 2004). This proposal will directly account for several semantic and distributional features of CSE VCRs; it will identify the featural trigger for verb- copying, explain the function of the obligatory perfective marker already, and model the asymmetries between the main verb and result predicate, where the higher verb cannot take aspectual marking as in (3) and the positions of the two clauses cannot be swapped as in (4): (3) *He eat rice already eat full (4) *He eat full eat rice already. It will be shown that these features fall out from the creation of a morphological V-Pred-v compound (e.g. eat-full-already), where the perfective marker already instantiates a light v that probes for both the main verb and result predicate. Phonological and morphological evidence for this fusion will be provided from both CSE data and cross-linguistic phenomena like German multiple wh-spellout in (McDaniel, 1986). Furthermore, the semantic differences in predicate-orientation between sentences (1) and (2), where in (1) the predicate full modifies the external arguement he while in (2) the predicate clean modifies the internal argument clothes, will be modelled by parallel underlying structures where the only difference is a c-commanded bound PRO in sentence (1) and a discourse- assigned pro in sentence (2).