Mutually Dependent Markers in Clause Pairs

This paper investigates the morphosyntactic properties of the mutually dependent markers in three representative constructions in Mandarin: the disjunctive yaome ... yaome ‘or...or’ construction, the metalinguistic comparative yuqi ... buru ‘than... rather’ construction, and the simultaneous temporal yibian ... yibian ‘when...when’ construction. It argues that the two mutually dependent markers in each of these constructions originate from the morphological split of a functional element that unifies coordinate and modification constructions.