To or Be or Not To Be: The Role of Syntactic Movement in Distinguishing Chinese Prepositions and Verbs

For typological and historical reasons, the category of prepositions in Modern Chinese
has been long debated in terms of its distribution, its classification, and even its very existence. This paper defends the existence of a prepositional category in Chinese as well as offers means to identify the category and distinguish prepositions from verbs by analyzing their distribution and syntactic capabilities. The research for this paper is based on existing literature on Chinese prepositions, Chinese syntax, and linguistic theories as well as on corpus analysis.