Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

MANDARIN CLAUSE LINKAGE^205

Disposal simply means that the object of the verb is, through the action or
event encoded by that verb, created or destroyed or made to undergo some
change. Since activities have no explicit endpoint, they convey no sense of
disposal and therefore cannot appear in the bä construction. Accomplish­
ment verbs, on the other hand, are carried through to their logical conclu­
sion, and when that conclusion involves changing the object in some way,
then disposal has occurred and the bä construction is possible. For exam­
ple, a bâ sentence equivalent to (16a) is not possible, since the activity of
hitting does not necessarily have any consequences for the object, but a bä
sentence equivalent of (16c) is perfectly acceptable.
(17) a. *Tä bâ fànwân qiäo.
he PRETRANS ricebowl hit
"He hits the ricebowl."
b. Tä bä fànwân qiäo pò le.
he PRETRANS ricebowl hit break ASP
"He broke the ricebowl (by hitting it)."
In general, activity verbs cannot occur in the bä construction without some
kind of complement(besides CR, it might also be a Complement of Degree,
directional complement, time expression, etc.) However, when such activ­
ity verbs occur in a CR construction, they can take bâ as long as the V 2 is a
verb whose inherent semantic content involves actual change in the object.
Therefore, a sentence like (18) is anomalous because my understanding of
the book is an internal mental process that in no way affects the book itself
(that is, the resultant state is predicated of the reader, not the book).
(18) 7WÖ bâ shu kán döng le.
I PRETRANS book read understand ASP
"I understood the book (by way of reading)."

2.2 Potential complement

The Potential Complement construction (henceforth PC) is a CR or similar

V + Complement construction^1 that has one of the particles bu or de

inserted in between V\ and V 2. That is, the structure is:

(NPa) Vx de/bu V 2 (NP 2 )

As with the CR, there are no unshared arguments, and it functions syntacti­

cally as a unitary verb. Semantically, however, the PC is quite different

from the CR, for it expresses not the accomplishment of a particular event,