Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

198 MARK HANSELL

1.1 Juxtaposition

Juxtaposition is a type of SVC that involves two or more sentences with
identical subjects arranged in a series, with the subject of all but the first
sentence deleted (zero subject). This is the type of SVC that Li and
Thompson (1981:595) call "two separate events". The canonical structure
of such a construction can be represented as:

(NP,) Vl (NP 2 ) V 2 (NP 3 )
where NPj is also the subject of the second verb, unrepresented on the sur­
face (either a case of zero anaphora, an empty category or deletion under
coreference, depending on theoretical preference). The optionality of the
NPs in parentheses describes a situation where either the verbs are intrans­
itive, or their objects are not expressed because they are understood from
context, a phenomenon much more common in Mandarin than English. For
example, in answer to the question "What are you going to do with that
book?", an English speaker might reply "Take it back and read it", expres­
sing the notion book pronominally, and not expressing the subject at all. A
Mandarin speaker need not express either, and would reply with a sentence
consisting only of verbs: dai huí qù kán, literally "take" + "return" + "go"

• "read".
  The serialized verb phrases in juxtaposition encode separate events,
  separated in time (i.e. non-simultaneous) and having independent truth val­
  ues (i.e. the truth of the occurrence reported by the second verb is not con­
  tingent on the truth of the occurrence reported by the first.) For example:
  (1) Tä chuän shàng le dàyî chûqù le.
  he put on ASP overcoat go out ASP
  "He put on his overcoat and went out."
  The events in (1) are separated in time in that they do not have to be simul­
  taneous, and separated in terms of truth value in that if the statement
  encoded by Vx is found to be false (i.e. if we discover that he didn't actually
  put his overcoat on), it has no effect on the truth value of the statement
  encoded by V 2 (whether he put his overcoat on or not, he still could have
  gone out.)
  If the different Vs in such a SVC encode separated events, then is there
  any connection between them that is not present in two separate sentences?
  Clearly there is, which we can see by comparing the English translation of
  (1) with two separate sentences: