Abstract
This paper shows that Mandarin Chinese permits complementation of unselected syntactic elements, and provides an explanation for this phenomenon. First, two word order asymmetries in Mandarin Chinese are discussed: the adjunct/complement asymmetry and the preverbal/postverbal asymmetry. According to these asymmetries, a Mandarin Chinese sentence can only take an adverbial in preverbal position but not in postverbal position, and, furthermore, when a modifier occurs in postverbal position, it is turned into a complement or is excluded. All of this points to a "Kaynean" character of the phrase structures in Mandarin Chinese as they meet the prediction of Kayne's (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA). This paper adopts the theory of Lin (2001) and assumes that Mandarin Chinese verbs and predicates do not have arguments of their own. A consequence of this theory is that the merger of syntactic elements in Mandarin Chinese, being free from the obscuring effects of predicate-argument combination (Escribano 2004), only needs to follow the guide of the LCA. This results in the "Kaynean" character of the phrase structures in Mandarin Chinese and specifically the two word order asymmetries mentioned above.