A Study On The Syntax Of Chinese Resultative VV Compounds

Chinese resultative verb-verb compounds (V₁ V₂S) have attracted a great deal of attention from many linguists, like Gu (1992, 1998), Huang (1988, 1992), Li (1990, 1993,1995,1998), Sybesma(1999), Zou (1994,1995), etc.This paper discusses the syntax of V₁V₂S. It is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 is an introduction to V₁V₂s. Chapter 2 introduces the previous studies on the formation of V₁V₂S, which are mainly divided into two approaches: the lexical and syntactic ones. The former believes that VVs are formed in the lexicon while the latter claims that VVs are formed in the syntax through incorporation. In this paper, I side with the syntactic approach and follow Huang's (1992) modal which claims that the argument, NP₂ after the VV in the construction "NP₁ VV NP₂.", should generate at the Spec of V₁P, as the object of V₁V₂S, in opposition to Sybesma's (1999) Small Clause analysis that the NP should generate at the Spec of XP, the resultative clause, as the subject of V₂. Chapter 3 gives some evidence in support of Huang's (1992) modal like topicalization, relativization and the semantic restriction on the object. Chapter 4 illustrates my point of view of VVs from two aspects. One is that I unify the structure of transitive and intransitive VVs with the aid of "the strong and weak phase" (Chomsky 1997). The other is that I try to test whether Direct Object Restriction (DOR) is also effective on Chinese VVs with the help of "the interacted construction" (Ren 1999). Chapter 5 concludes that Chinese resultative VVs are formed in the syntax in the framework of Huang (1992).