Light predicate raising in the Mandarin post-VP adverbial nominal constructions

Abstract In Mandarin, a nominal may follow a string that is composed of a monomorphemic verb and its monomorphemic object. The nominal exhibits the same constraints as a preverbal PP. Also, unlike a canonical or non-canonical object, such a nominal cannot be deleted. It is argued that such a nominal is the object of a preposition; the PP is base-generated as a left adverbial of a shortest transitive VP; and after the leftward raising of the light VP and deletion of the preposition, the nominal surfaces to the right of the VP. Based on this study, the paper reports a form economy in syntactic operations.