Abstract
In the literature of linguistic typology, Chinese and Vietnamese are often put side by side at the far end of the scale of analyticity. This paper explores some major aspects of this robust analyticity from a comparative point of view. For one thing, it has been established that Chinese sports a prolific system of implicit light verbs, which results in a variety of syntax-semantics mismatches within the verbal domain (cf. Huang 1994, 1997, 2015, Lin 2001, Feng 2005, Tang 2010, Tsai 2015, 2016, 2020a, 2021a, among others). For another, being radically isolating, Chinese also sports quite a few “bare” constructions that make it typologically unique (for instance, bare finite clauses and bare conditionals built upon pairing identical wh-expressions). In this paper, we deal with a construction with both typological traits, that is, the so-called flip-flop constructions. We present a unified account of verb raising in both Chinese and Vietnamese flip-flop constructions, and argue that the optionality of V-to-M movement is only an illusion, based on various facts from the distribution of Vietnamese modals and their silent counterparts. More specifically, flip sentences should be broken down further into two types: One type involves a mono-clausal configuration where verb raising is obligatory. By contrast, the other type involves a bi-clausal configuration where the verb in the complement clause raises to a local modal, which can be either lexical or silent.