| The Chinese V-O verb, a special subdivision of the Chinese compounds, is most strikingly characterized by its features of detachability and intransitivity. But nowadays in the society the number of transitivized V-O verbs is increasing. Ever since the beginning of the 1980s when the Chinese V-O verb first aroused the interests of scholars and researchers, most of their studies have been aimed at the features of this type of verb, its tendency of transitivization and the proper usage for a V-O verb to take an object. However, the studies on the motivation of its transitivization have been limited in scope and number. Besides, most of the previous researches were based on a qualitative study of the typical examples. The present study attempts to give a corpus based analysis of the degree of transitivity of different V-O verbs and the frequency of different semantic roles acting as their objects.The results of the analysis indicate that generally there are only a small number of transitivized V-O verb in Chinese at present though the number is increasing. The V-O verbs differentiate in terms of their degrees of transitivization. The study finds out 28 highly transitivized V-O verbs and 17 V-O verbs with a low degree of transitivity. The description of the frequency of the semantic roles shows that dative, locative and patient are the three semantic roles that most frequently serve as the objects of the V-O verb. This is determined by their semantic features.Following a corpus based description of the V-O verb, we present an analysis of the motivation for a V-O verb to take an object from a cognitive perspective. We argue that this process is a projection of the setting frame, which is evoked by the V-O verb, to the syntactic position of object in a new construction, dominated by Gestalt laws of perception. This cognitive model provides a justified explication to the mechanism of the transitivization of the V-O verb, and could shed some light on the study of semantic-syntax interface.
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