MANDARIN CLAUSE LINKAGE 203
2. Complement constructions
Complement constructions (henceforth CCs) are serializations of verbs that
share common arguments, concatenated directly with no intervening lexical
material. The three commonly recognized types of CC are:
- Complement of Result
- Potential Complement
- Complement of Degree
2.1 Complement of result
The Complement of Result (henceforth CR) is a concatenation of two lexi
cal verbs. This VV serialization functions syntactically as a unitary verb,
that is, a sentence with a CR as its verb is a simple sentence. The two Vs
not only have shared arguments (as in the various SVCs above), but cannot
have any unshared arguments, allowing for the valence of the two verbs. In
other words, if both Vs are transitive, then both arguments must be shared,
if one is transitive and one intransitive, then the one argument of the
intransitive verb must be identical to one of the arguments of the transitive
verb. For example:
(12) Tä qiäo pò le yí ge fanwän.
he hit break ASP one CLF ricebowl
"He broke (by hitting) a ricebowl."
(13) Wo kàn döng le nei ben shu.
I read understand ASP that CLF book
"I understood (by way of reading) that book."
(14) Tä hing si le.
he sick die ASP
"He died of disease/ He got sick and died."
(12) shows the situation where is transitive and V 2 is intransitive. Here
the only argument of the intransitive pò, the patient fanwän, is coreferen-
tial with the object (goal) of the transitive qiäo, so all possible arguments
are shared. In (13), both verbs are transitive and both arguments are identi
cal: [read' (I, book)], and [understand' (I, book)]; and in (14), both verbs
are intransitive and share their sole argument: [sick' (he)], and [die' (he)].
Semantically the CR combines two verbs, expressing an action and its
result. Tai (1984) claims that Mandarin has no lexical accomplishment
