Towards a unified analysis of Mandarin non-canonical arguments

Abstract

In Mandarin, agent and theme arguments occur in complementary distribution with so-called “non-canonical” arguments (NCAs) that realize oblique thematic roles (Li 2014, Lin 2001). In this paper, we demonstrate that such alternations can be derived naturally from a combination of independent and cross-linguistically well-established phenomena, including (non-)recursive applicative heads (Nie 2020) and anti-agentivity (Martin et al. 2023).