An Analysis of the Syntactic Structure and Derivation of the Chinese Excessive Complement:On the Verb-complement Construction with Low Compositionality
Apart from indicating a resultative meaning,the"VA le"construction in Mandarin Chinese also serves to convey an excessive meaning as compared to the speaker's expectation.The"VA le"construction conveying excessive meaning(hereafter referred to as excessive complement construction,or ECC)exhibits significant differences from typical verb-complement structures in terms of argument alignment,expansion and transformation.Unlike the resultative complements,the excessive complements cannot take objects(we refer to this rule as the constraints of object-taking)and ECC can license intervening materials between the verb and the excessive complements.Our research focuses on providing a syntactic explanation for the distinctiveness of excessive complement,alongside deriving its various patterns of argument realization.This paper reveals that the seeming cohesion of ECC is a false impression,as the excessive complement falls within a finite phrase with tense-aspect features,rendering it incapable of meeting the conditions for generating verb-complement compounds.ECC is essentially a form of verb-complement construction with low compositionality that is devoid of a complement marker.In this line,the elastic linking patterns of V-C construction can be optimized.Complements introduced by markers such as de(得)are in a construction with high compositionality,while excessive complements without markers are in a construction with low compositionality.The high and the low constructions show significant differences in terms of argument alignment and expansion ability.In addition,the linking between excessive complement and verb does not rely on the complement marker or argument coindexation.This feature sets ECC apart from complement structure with de and certain serial verb constructions.Accordingly,the distinguishing feat-ures of excessive complement can be uniformly explained based on the syntactic structure with low compositionality.Through the investigation into the syntactic structure of excessive complement,this study refines the criteria for discerning"cohesion/composition"verb-complement structures in Chinese and elaborates on the elasticity in linking patterns.
VA leexcessive complementV-C construction with low compositionalityelastic linking patterns of V-C construction
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