ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 has investigated the BA constructions both diachronically and synchronically from the prosodic perspective. First, the author has discussed the well-formedness condition for the BA constructions in Mandarin Chinese and concluded that both syntax and semantics fail to generalize the bare verb effect. After that, it is argued that the interaction of the Nuclear Stress Principle and the Branching Condition can account for the ungrammaticality of the BA constructions with bare verbs. Then the author has spared a lot of efforts to discuss the birth of the BA construction in terms of the prosodic structure. It is argued that the BA sentences that have originated from the BA sentences of purpose which requires the sentence-final verb to be de-stressed and the stress of the purposive sentences can be shifted to the end of sentences in the poetic environments, giving birth to the original BA construction. Finally, this chapter reviews the previous analyses on the syntactic structure of the BA constructions in Mandarin Chinese.
