Imperfective aspect zhe, agent deletion, and locative inversion in Mandarin Chinese

In this article I argue that not all the verbs that undergo locative inversion in Mandarin Chinese are intrinsically unaccusative as assumed in the literature. The fact that some transitive non-passivized verbs can undergo locative inversion is argued to be the result of morphological operations rather than the result of transitive alternation (cf. Cheng 1989). One such operation - that involving the morpheme zhe - is described here; I claim that it deletes the agent role of a verb if certain conditions are met, and allows the verb in question to satisfy the conditions on locative inversion (Bresnan and Kanerva 1989). I also argue that the zhe operation is not a variant of the passive operation, but a morphological operation in its own right. © 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers.