The property concepts and the possessive verb Ū ‘Have’ in Taiwan Southern Min

Abstract

This paper delineates an alternative analysis of the property concepts of ū ‘have’ in Taiwan Southern Min, claiming that the complements serve syntactically as the nominal gradabilities through three syntactic (constituency) tests, and supported by a crosslinguistic perspective. Additionally, in the vein of Distributed Morphology, the gradability functions as an nP (also as a nominalization), in contrast with NP/DP. From a typological perspective, it is not peculiar for ū to select a nominalization of property concept to signal a reading of property-denoting. Moreover, I illustrate the semantics of a possessive property concept construction in Taiwan Southern Min, according to Francez and Koontz-Garboden (2015, 2017). I further propose a modal aspectual semantics to interpret the various temporal readings of ū. Finally, I draw a conclusion to my alternative analyses.