The syntax and semantics of event measurements in Mandarin

In this paper, I explore the syntax and semantics of the prenominal duration and frequency phrases in Mandarin. I offer an explicit syntactic analysis of the ‘verb+ duration/frequency phrase+ direct object’ construction in Mandarin Chinese, and argue that the duration/frequency phrase forms a constituent with the direct object in this particular construction. Based on this syntactic account, I propose that the semantics of the direct object has a shifted event description meaning that can be measured directly by the duration phrase and counted by the frequency phrase. This analysis supports Kennedy’s (2012) semantic analysis of incremental change.