This dissertation presents a study of the verb copy construction (VCC) in Chinese from diachronic and synchronic perspectives. In the VCC, the verb must be duplicated before a post-verbal adjunct, in the presence of another post-verbal constituent, as in (1). 1 tajiaozhangsan *jiao xingle hecallZhang Sancall wakeupASP ` HewokeupZhang San.'; The VCC has been argued to represent a post-verbal constraint (PVC), which I define as 'A single verb may not be followed by more than one constituent, unless all of the constituents are subcategorized elements'.; Given that the VCC and PVC did not exist in Old and Middle Chinese, this study examines how and why they emerged diachronically, and proposes that they are a reaction to a syntactic and pragmatic/semantic conflict which developed on post-verbal adjuncts: syntactically, the post-verbal adjuncts are motivated to appear in the position directly following the main verb, due to pattern pressure from compound verbs of the form VC; pragmatically and semantically, however, the post-verbal adjuncts must remain in sentence-final position, the position of greatest informativeness. The VCC represents a perfect reconciliation of this conflict: in a VCC, the post-verbal adjunct directly follows a verb, and yet is also in sentence-final position.; The other focus of the study is the formal analysis of the VCC in Lexical-Functional Grammar. In previous studies, the VCC has been analyzed as a single-headed structure, with the first VP as an adjunct to the second. Based on historical evidence, facts of aspect attachment and of adjunct distribution, I propose that the VCC is a coordinate VP, with each conjunct as a head. I further propose that the VP containing all subcategorized arguments of the verb stands in a formal subsumption relation to each other VP. This subsumption constraint directly explains why that VP must be the first VP if it occurs at all in the VCC.
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