Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

MANDARIN CLAUSE LINKAGE 199

(1') He put on his coat. He went out.

In Mandarin, as in English, (Γ) represents two events that are not only sep­

arate, but also have no relation to one another. They do not even necessar­

ily have to be consecutive in time, because if the question had been "List

everything that he did", (1") could be just as good a reply as (Γ):

(1") He went out. He put on his coat.

Consecutiveness in time, then, is one of the relations between VP's expres­
sed by use of Juxtaposition. The others, as taken from Li and Thompson
(1981):
(2) Wo mài maóbï xië zi. Purpose
I buy writing-brush write characters
"I'm buying a writing brush to write characters with."
(3) Zài wänhui tä hê jiü tiàowu. Alternating actions
at party he drink wine dances
"At the party he drank and danced."
(4) Wo wànshàng chûqu hën hàipà. Circumstances
I evening go-out very fear
"I'm afraid to go out in the evening."
The "Circumstances" use of Juxtaposition as shown in (4) could also be
reasonably analyzed as having a nominalized sentence ("going out in the
evening") as its subject, in which case it could not be considered a SVC at
all. Such a question, while interesting, is beside the point of this paper and
will not be discussed further. Most of what follows will deal with the Con­
secutive Action and Purposive uses of Juxtaposition.

1.2 Pivot construction

The Pivot Construction (Chao 1968, Li & Thompson 1981) is a SVC where

the object of the first verb is coreferent with the subject of the second one,

and thus by equi-NP deletion or zero anaphora, (or, in the system to be

used in this paper, by sharing of arguments) the one NP serves as an argu­

ment of both Vj and V 2. The canonical structure of the Pivot Construction

is as follows:

(NPl)Wl NP 2 V 2 (NP 3 )

pivot