The Syntax of the Ba-Constructions

Abstract

The Ba-construction has been widely discussed in the literature; however, few satisfactory studies have been carried out on the Ba-construction from a syntactic approach. In this paper 1 will argue for the fact that the Ba predicate describes a bounded or telic event and the DP after Ba is encoded either as specific or definite. What's more, Ba is reanalyzed as a functional head which has an uninterpretable DP feature that must be checked in the spec of AspP. According to the Minimalist approach, the predicate checks its bounded feature in the head of AspP. Moreover, I will argue that any DP selected by the BaP has to move. Based on Travis'(1991; 2000) vP structure, my analysis of the Ba-construction can offer a unified analysis for all the Ba data.