The Subject Chain in a Compositional Cognitive Grammar

Subject-verb agreement in Mandarin is an Interactional pheno-menon, involving semantics and syntax as two Interactive grammatical modules. The semantic Subject Chain, coding the primary participant in an event, maps onto the syntactic First Argument, functioning as the Subject of the sentence expressing this event. The subject chain refers to the primary participant itself, and not to how it relates to the event actions normally coded as verbs or co-verbs, making corresponding subject-verb relation non-crucial. This explains why Mandarin subject-verb relation shows no agreement and requires no morphological markings for agreement. We discuss the subject chain in the framework of a Compositional Cognitive Grammar (CCG), which in turn is a particular realization of the general concept of an Emergent Grammar (EG).