Grammatical Representations of the Verb Phrase in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from Syntactic Priming in Five-Year-Olds

<b>Background/Objectives:</b> Debates regarding how to represent verb phrases (VPs) consisting of the verb plus the complement and the aspectual marker -<i>le</i> in Mandarin Chinese remain an issue. <b>Methods:</b> Syntactic priming under a memory disguise paradigm was employed to investigate the issue using the SVO-<i>ba</i> alternation, where the SVO structure consists of a subject verb object, and the <i>ba</i> structure of a subject <i>ba</i> object verb, in five-year-olds (<i>n</i> = 216), an age with fully fledged grammatical knowledge but little interference from literacy. <b>Results:</b> The results indicate that both the complement and the marker -<i>le</i> should be represented in terms of phrasal rather than morphological structures. When -<i>le</i> is inflected to the verb alone, realization, which makes an event a fact, rather than completion, which makes an event finished, is accomplished. The event must be telicized to a state through a resultative complement to induce reliable production of the <i>ba</i> construction. The postverbal elements represent their own phrasal structure and challenge the verb-centered lexico-syntactic account because there are no additional representations left within a verb. <b>Conclusions:</b> More elicitations of the SVO than the <i>ba</i> invite future neurolinguistic explorations to disentangle the impacts of the frequency and thematic arrangement of agent and patient on grammatical representations cross-linguistically.