Duration Phrases as Fake Nominal Quantifiers: A Functional Account with Corpus Evidence

The study reexamines the grammatical status and function of the duration phrase in the V-DurP-de-NP structure wo du le santian de shu ‘I read books for three days.’ The DurP, semantically a verbal complement, is taken to be a fake nominal quantifier through a syntactic test. The puzzling form-meaning mismatch in the expression is justified from a functional perspective with corpus evidence. The study proposes that the DurP is incorporated into the object-NP to serve as an event delimiter. It is coerced into a typically nonreferential object to meet the “heavy added information constraint” hypothesized by Chafe [1]. The event-delimiting function is evidenced by the fact that DurPs are mutually exclusive with other event-delimiting measures, which is supported by corpus evidence on the referential properties of the involved NPs. This study provides new insight into the form-function pairing relation of the construction.