On chui and shai in Mandarin Chinese

【摘要】：正 Introduction The weather verbs chui [吹] and shai [曬] in Mandarin Chinese demonstrate different characteristics from other weather verbs. Unlike the null subject in most weather verbs, chui and shai require both internal and external arguments and the switch of the two arguments does not demand any syntactic variation as in 我曬太陽and 太阳曬我. Three analyses from different angles: morphological, semantic, and syntactic, have been applied to investigate this phenomenon. The morphological analysis concludes that the VO sequence such as 曬太阳and 吹风are VO phrases instead of VN compounds. The semantic analysis illustrates the theta roles of the arguments in the weather sentences all follow a thematic hierarchy. And the syntactic analysis accounts for the relatedness of the paired weather sentences with switched arguments and explains the derivation of one from the other via a VP-shell light verb construction.