A study on the evolution of syntactic generation mechanisms based on the emergence of Chinese resultative verb compounds
The current mainstream view in academia believes that the resultative verb construction in Mandarin has evolved from the coordinate serial verb construction in Ar-chaic Chinese.However,the trend of disyllablization and the head-shift analysis proposed by previous studies fail to account for the motivation and internal mechanism of this change.By comparing the two types of resultative verb compounds(RVCs)formed by head shift and the strong and weak resultatives,this paper argues that the RVC with head shifting to V1 is a kind of weak resultatives,which involves the incorporation of the com-plex verb root into a light verb.The RVC with head shifting to V2 is a kind of strong re-sultatives,involving not only incorporation,but also conflation of the manner root √V1 with the light verb v.The findings of this study indicate that conflation is a later emerged syntactic operation compared to incorporation,which leads to the change from the coordi-nate verb construction to the resultative verb construction,and in a broader sense,pro-motes the transformation of Chinese from a verb-framed language to a satellite-framed lan-guage.
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
维普
