Once upon an invisible TIME: On Frequentative Phrases in Chinese

Abstract

In view of Kayne’s (2014) analysis, the English expressions of once, twice, and #-times are compared with the corresponding Chinese expression, #-ci. This paper shows that data from Chinese not only support Kayne’s analysis that treats the silent TIME as classifier, but they also suggest that the frequentative phrase may involve a silent NP and/or PP. The latter provides some possible modifications to Kayne’s original analysis of the suffix -ce.

Keywords

• silent element
• durative/frequentative phrases
• classifiers
• chinese syntax