Three applicative GEIs in Mandarin Chinese

This paper focuses on three types of applicative GEI distributed across three
different syntactic layers in Mandarin Chinese. I propose that, in addition to Tsai’s
(2017) high applicative GEI, which is located in the complementizer layer (above
TP), there is also a differently behaved lower applicative GEI with two subtypes,
one in the inflectional layer (between vP and TP), and the other in the lexical layer
(within vP). This lower applicative GEI is shown to be different from other
seemingly similar GEI PPs. Finally, a third kind of applicative GEI, also located in vP, is
presented and compared. The current study not only rounds out the distributional
picture of applicative GEIs, but also provides us with more understanding of the
lexical and syntactic diversity of GEI in Mandarin Chinese.