Mandarin Resultative Verb Compounds, Where Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics Meet

by Chao Li

This book undertakes two major tasks. First, it offers a lexical-semantic account of Mandarin resultative verb compounds (RVCs) within the event structure model of argument representation and argument realization developed on the basis of Levin & Rappaport Hovav's work (particularly Levin 1999 and Rappaport Hovav & Levin 1998). On this account, the complex thematic relations expressed by RVCs result from different interactions of the individual thematic relation expressed by each component of the compound and the composite thematic relation expressed by the whole compound, and from the different ways of realizing the Causer and the Causee. Second, the book places the study of Mandarin RVCs in a larger context and examines four aspects of Mandarin RVCs from a crosslinguistic perspective, namely the subject-oriented reading (when the causing predicate is unergative or transitive), the "scare reading," the occurrence in the inchoative frame of a causative alternation, and the use of a stative causing predicate. It shows that all these phenomena are crosslinguistically marked and thus typologically significant. It argues that the differences among English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Romanian, and Swedish with respect to the first three phenomena fall out of the difference in the way the resultative is formed (namely, compound resultatives vs. non-compound resultatives), the headedness of the compound (and the degree of topic prominence of the language).

Paperback

Published January 1, 2008