Abstract
This work focuses on the affective construction in Mandarin Chinese and Hakka. The affective construction has two types, either in the overt form marking the Affectee by Mandarin gei ‘give’ or Hakka t’ung ‘with ’,or in the covert form in which the Affectee does not have any marker. The affective construction is a sort of argument augmentation. The predicate of the affective construction with all its arguments saturated still can take the extra argument—the Affectee once it is licensed by the head of applicatives. Tsai (2007) proposes that there are four types of affective constructions in Mandarin—very high applicative, high applicative, middle applicative and low applicative. The overt construction introducing the Affectee be gei belongs to the higher groups, while the covert types represent the middle and low groups. Followed Tsai (2007), we propose that the very high and high Applicatives in Hakka are expressed by the t’ung constructions. By contrast, Hakka middle applicative has two types of construals: the fist type does without any marker which is headed by implicit applicative head; the other type is marked affective construction which is headed by t’ung. Thus, t’ung has double statuses: it can serve as a high applicative head, and a middle applicative head. The Hakka Affectives stands in the borderland between Mandarin and Chinese dialects. Like Mandarin, the unmarked middle types and the high applicative type also can be observed in Hakka. Like Chinese dialect such as Southern Min, Hakka has marked middle Applicatives but lacks a typical low applicative construction.