Working Paper Series

Abstract: Basically there are two different views on the argument realization of resultative V-V compounds in Mandarin Chinese. One derives the compounds in the lexicon, and the other in syntax. However, some crucial problems remained unclear either in a pure lexical analysis or in a pure syntactic approach. Following Hale and Keyser (1993), this paper adopts a lexical-syntactic approach to Mandarin resultative v-v compounds and assumes that all subject NPs are external to VP/AP but introduced and licensed by the little v, which is a new unsatured predicate resulting from incorporating a light verb with a root verb. Therefore, the external subject NP gets its semantic role through the predication relationship that holds between the subject NP and the little v phrase as a whole, which means that the subject NP should be semantically consistent with the little v, as well as the root verb. Such assumption hence not only account for the problems remained either in the lexical approach or the pure syntactic analysis, but also captures Chinese native speakers’ intuition that V2 plays an important role in the interpretation of V-V compounds.