Literature on the linguistic analyses of RVCs is abundant in Chinese linguistics
(e.g., Chao 1968, Li and Thompson 1981, Tai 1984, 2003, He 1992, Liu 1996 among others). Among them, some focus on the classification of RVCs, made according to
the type of result characterized by either their two component parts, or the second part (e.g., Li and Thompson 1981, and Liu 1996) and some pay attention to the semantic characteristics of RVCs such as Tai (1984, 2003) and He (1992). In this section, we will review Tai’s (1984, 2003) and He’s (1992) analyses in turn since the current research puts more emphasis on the semantic properties of RVCs.
2.3.1 Tai (1984)
Tai (1984), in his study on the semantic meaning of verbs in Mandarin Chinese, expounds that Mandarin RVCs and English Accomplishments have the action-result semantic relation between their semantic components, but they are different in one important aspect. That is, unlike English Accomplishments, which encode the aspectual meaning of both the action and result, the RVCs, however, include only the result aspect16 in their aspectual meaning. To illustrate this point, consider the
sentences in (28):
(28) a. * Ta zhengzai hua-wan nazhang hua.
he imperfective Asp. paint-finish that CL picture b. He is painting that picture.’
As can be seen from Example (28a), the RVC hua-wan ‘paint-finish’ is not allowed to go with the imperfective marker zhengzai. The reason is simply that RVCs do not encode the aspectual meaning of the action, though they may have the
16 The terms ‘action aspect’ and ‘result aspect’ are used by Tai (1984). In the RVC construction, the action aspect confers the aspectual meaning of the action verb, and the result aspect, that of the result component.
action-result semantic relation (Tai 1984). Without the aspectual meaning of action, RVCs lack the feature of duration. Hence, they are incompatible with durative linguistic labels such as the imperfective marker zhengzai. Contrarily, the aspectual meaning of the English Accomplishment includes both the action aspect and result aspect, and hence the Accomplishment is compatible with the English progressive, as in (28b). On the basis of the contrast between RVCs and Accomplishments, it is not appropriate to treat RVCs as Accomplishments.
There are three points about Tai’s (1984) analysis of Mandarin RVCs that are worth noting. First, RVCs denote instantaneous events on account of the notion that the time schema for RVCs does not have continuous tenses (Tai 1984). This supports our earlier analysis that RVCs denote instantaneous events. Second, in contrast to Tai’s study, in some work attempting to investigate the semantic structure of Mandarin verbs, RVCs were taken as accomplishment verbs by mistake (i.e., Teng 1985 and Smith 1997). Tai’s analysis helps us pinpoint where those linguists go wrong in their research: they fail to recognize that the aspectual meaning of RVCs excludes the action aspect. In other words, they do not realize that Mandarin RVCs and English Accomplishments are different in a fundamental manner: while Accomplishments are semantically durative, RVCs are semantically instantaneous.
Third, the cross-linguistic variations between Mandarin RVCs and English
Accomplishments prompt Tai (1984) to contend that Mandarin exhibits three types of verbs, namely States, Activities and Results. The verb category of Results, according to Tai (1984:295), is mostly expressed with the Resultative Verb Compounds (RVCs).
The author further suggests that among the four categories of verbs Vendler (1967) identifies-- States, Activities, Accomplishments and Achievements, Achievements and Accomplishments are realized in Mandarin in the form of RVC. For example, the Mandarin counterparts of the Achievement verbs17 find and hear are RVCs, namely
‘zhao-dao seek-reach’ and ‘ting-jian listen-perceive’, respectively. Apart from the Achievement, Tai (1984:290-291) reports that the English Accomplishment verb may be expressed with the RVC in Mandarin, such learn, corresponding to as in xue-hui
‘study-understand’. However, Tai (1984) claims that RVCs are not comparable to English Accomplishments since there is one notable difference between the semantic focus of the Mandarin RVC and that of the English Accomplishment: while the result part constitutes the semantic focus of the RVC, both the action and the result parts are the semantic foci of the Accomplishment. Or in Tai’s (1984:292) term, the RVC has only the result aspect. Tai thus concludes that Mandarin lacks the category of Accomplishment verbs.
One important insight from Tai’s (1984) study is that English lacks a direct
17 There are Achievements taking the form of a simple verb in Mandarin, as in si ‘die’ (Tai 1984:294).
counterpart of Mandarin RVCs. Although it seems that the English Accomplishment is the closet translation of the Mandarin RVC in that both of them exhibit the action-result semantic property explicitly or implicitly, there is however one crucial cross-linguistic distinction between the RVC and Accomplishment. To illustrate this
point, consider the sentences in (29):
(29) a. Ta sha-si-le Lisi.
he kill-dead-LE Lisi b. He killed Lisi.
(29b) is the translation equivalent of (29a); however, there is a subtle difference between (29a) and (29b). The difference lies in how the completion/result of a closed event is expressed in Mandarin and English. In Mandarin, the notion of completion is explicitly characterized with the resultative morpheme of the RVC, while in English the specification of completion is inherent in the meaning of the main verb (i.e., kill) in a perfective sentence. Our analysis conforms to Tai’s (2003) that the result of the event is covertly expressed in English, but overtly expressed in Mandarin. In other words, unlike Mandarin, English does not have a clear ‘result-marking system’ which characterizes the result of the event with the resultative morpheme like that of the RVC.
2.3.2 He (1992) and Tai (2003)
Based on Tai’s (1984) analysis that RVCs encode only the result aspect in their
aspectual meaning, He (1992), in his investigation on the semantic characteristics of RVCs, maintains that the result component is the semantic prime that confers the
central meaning to the RVC. For example:
(30) a. Wo du-dong-le neiben shu.
I read-understand-LE that CL book ‘I understood that book through reading.’
b. Wo du-le neiben shu.
I read-LE that CL book ‘I read that book.’
c. Wo dong-le neiben shu.
I understand-LE that CL book ‘I understood that book.’
(He 1992:122) He (1992) observes that the result predication in (30c) expresses the main idea of (30a) with the RVC du-dong ‘read-understand’. Tai (2003), similar to He (1992), holds that the result part constitutes the semantic focus of the RVC. Tai also points out a cross-linguistic difference between Mandarin and English in structuring events consisting of both an action and a result. That is, Tai suggests that in Mandarin, such events are unequivocally expressed with the compound verbs of RVCs; English,
however, unlike Mandarin, which has the consistent action-result schema18 in the
18 Tai (2003:305) states that like Mandarin, in which the action-result schema are linguistically expressed by the RVC, English has the resultative construction that realizes the action-result schema, but the English resultative construction is structurally different from Mandarin RVCs, as in:
(i) a. He kicked the door open.
event description, uses various grammatical patterns to characterize the same events.
We can demonstrate this cross-linguistic difference by citing one of Tai’s examples, as in:
(31) a. Ta jia-cuo-le laogong she marry-wrong-LE husband
b. She has married the wrong husband.
(Tai 2003:304) In (31a) with the RVC jia-cuo ‘marry-wrong’, the mistake expressed with the resultative morpheme cuo ‘wrong’ signifies the result of the action expressed with jia
‘marry’. In contrast, (31b) shows that in the English event description, the mistake signified by wrong modifies the object noun husband. In light of the cross-linguistic difference in structuring the action-result event, Tai states that the result of an event is overtly expressed with the resultative morpheme of RVCs in Mandarin, whereas in English the result is covertly expressed or implied in the meaning of the perfective sentence. On the basis of the cross-linguistic difference between Mandarin and English regarding the expression of the result of an event, Tai claims that the result part of an event would be more salient to Mandarin-speaking people than to
b. He painted the house red.
It is also important to point out that although the action-result schema could be directly triggered by the resultative construction in English, English is much less liberal in the use of the resultative construction than Mandarin in the use of RVCs. There are many constraints on the formation of the English resultative. For example, Carrier and Randall (1992) argue that the result predicate is fairly free in terms of category (i.e., an AP, a PP, or an NP), but it does not take every potential result phrase within these categories. For further discussions of the English resultative construction, see Goldberg (1991) and Carrier and Randall (1992).
English-speaking people. In other words, English speakers would attend more to the action part of the event than to the result.
Tai’s view that the result is not emphasized in English event description is supported by Hoekstra (1988), who in his study on the English resultative construction expounds that the result predication is a ‘shadow interpretation’ in that
it is a cancelable predication, as in (32):
(32) They cooked [the chicken dry].19
(Hoekstra 1988:117) Hoekstra’s explanation for the ‘shadow interpretation’ is twofold. First, he observes that there is not a sensible semantic relationship between the verb cook and the postverbal NP the chicken. Rather, the postverbal NP has a sensible semantic relationship with the following predicative expression. Second, Hoekstra points out that the main verb in the English resultative construction does not usually take an object,20 which means that the result predication is merely an adjunct to the verb.
This implies that the result predication and the main verb are completely independent of each other. Based on the two accounts, Hoekstra concludes that the focus of (32) is on the main verb, not on the result interpretation. Therefore, the cancellation of the
result predication will not change the meaning of the sentence.
19 The two constituents in the result predicate form a small clause (Hoekstra1988).
20 According to Hoekstra (1988), the main verb in the English resultative construction is usually an intransitive verb, as in:
(i) He painted [the door green].
2.4 Cross-linguistic Comparisons between Mandarin RVCs and English