Mandarin verb doubling as verb-phrase fronting

This article develops the idea that the doubling of Mandarin verbs arises as the result of an interaction between VP fronting and the way copy deletion and realisation work in such derivations. The proposal accounts for previously unnoticed properties, such as anti-adjacency effects and the obligatory presence of postverbal adverbials, among others, while lending further support to anti-locality, vP phasehood, the specifier view of Mandarin postverbal adverbials, and Saab’s (2008, 2017) theory of pronunciation. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2024.