The Syntax of the Mandarin Chinese Adpositional Imperfective

This paper proposes a new syntactic analysis of the Mandarin zai` progressive, based on the argument that imperfectives and spatial adpositions share a core semantic relation. First, I argue that zai` is always a locative adposition, based on cross-linguistic diagnostics (Svenonius 2004), distributional evidence, and a novel Mandarin ‘right’-modification test. Then, I show how a unified Figure-Ground semantics for locative adpositions (Talmy 2011, 1978; Svenonius 2006, 2004) can be used to the derive the progressive interpretation. Adopting a unified Figure-Ground semantics offers a potential explanation for why some languages encode imperfective aspect using locative adpositions, as opposed to verbal aspectual markers.