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<p>Mandarin <i>bei</i>-passives differ from English <i>be</i>-passives in exhibiting robust semantic constraints. They need to be licensed, by telicity, the experiential perfect, or predicates allowing intention transmittion. These seemingly disjunctive licensing conditions can receive a unified account, based on the semantic notion of affectedness, which we analyze as a family of implicationally organized affectee roles following Beavers (2011). It is argued that Mandarin passives require the highest level of affectedness, which predicts the incompatibility with thematic liberality and the possibility of gapless passives. We also discuss how the affectedness approach can be extended in novel ways to understand the relevance of social impact in <i>bei</i>-passives and to capture cross-linguistic differences in passives.</p>

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An affectedness approach to Mandarin passives

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

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  • 发表日期：

    2025年5月5日

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  • Jess H.-K. Law,
  • Colin Hirschberg

摘要

Mandarin bei-passives differ from English be-passives in exhibiting robust semantic constraints. They need to be licensed, by telicity, the experiential perfect, or predicates allowing intention transmittion. These seemingly disjunctive licensing conditions can receive a unified account, based on the semantic notion of affectedness, which we analyze as a family of implicationally organized affectee roles following Beavers (2011). It is argued that Mandarin passives require the highest level of affectedness, which predicts the incompatibility with thematic liberality and the possibility of gapless passives. We also discuss how the affectedness approach can be extended in novel ways to understand the relevance of social impact in bei-passives and to capture cross-linguistic differences in passives.