Plural events and the progressive particle in Dalad Chinese, and the final-over-final condition

This paper examines a special progressive marker in Dalad Chinese, which can appear either in the postverbal position or in the post VP position, corresponding to cumulative reading and collective reading respectively. Drawing on the spirit of constructivist approaches to argument structure, especially Borer (Structuring sense, Volume I: In Name only, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005a, Structuring sense, Volume II: The normal course of events, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005b), we propose a functional structure of events that involves a Quan(tity)P above vP, which pluralises the event denoted by vP, giving rise to the cumulative reading. Following Biberauer’s (in: Sheehan, Biberauer, Roberts, and Holmberg (eds) The final-over-final condition: a syntactic universal, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2017b) ‘acategorial-particle hypothesis’, we provide an account for the positions of and explaine why the Final-over-Final-Condition (FOFC) (Holmberg, in: Svenonius (ed) The derivation of VO and OV, Linguistik Aktuell, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2000; Biberauer et al. in Linguist Inquiry 45(2):169–225, 2014; Sheehan et al. The final-over-final condition: a syntactic universal, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2017) is not violated. We argue that is an acategorial particle that lacks formal feature, only bearing a semantic feature denoting progressive aspectual information. When the event structure involves only a single event, is adjoined to vP, and is placed in the vP final position due to its acategorial status: not being a head in the extended projection, it has to be placed in the final position in order to be consistent with head-initiality in Dalad Chinese. When QuanP is projected, cannot be adjoined to the QuanP: being an acategorial particle, it cannot see into QuanP, hence it is not able to Agree with the verbal head. In order to provide its progressive aspectual information, is adjoined to the verb as a last resort. This analysis explains the correlation between the postverbal position of and the cumulative reading, and is extended to the account of other issues such as the quantity restriction on the object and the exclusion of the negator in the V- construction.