208 MARK HANSELL
Clearly the PC constructions kán de döng and kàn bu döng are indivisible
units, and the NEG marker bu has scope over the whole unit (I will suggest
a formulation of this in section 5 below).
2.3 Complement of degree
The Complement of Degree is a construction with several variants of form
and myriad functions. Its basic form is:
NPj Vj de X V 2
where X can be filled by a wide range of possible material. It is the presence
of the material in X that differentiates the Complement of Degree from the
Potential Complement, which allows nothing to occur in between delbu and
v 2
The Complement of Degree is extremely problematic (see footnote 6
and section 5.3 below), and under thorough analysis will probably be found
to be a cover term for a variety of different constructions. Such a thorough
analysis is well beyond the scope of the present study. My hope is that this
paper will present an overall framework for dealing with clause linkage that
is comprehensive and convincing enough that it can later be applied to
some thornier problems like Complement of Degree, which displays a wide
variety of clause linkage types. The present analysis, however, can be
drawn most clearly by comparing and contrasting the clearest extremes of
serialization vs. complementation, avoiding the gray areas until the analyti
cal framework is well established.3. Complement constructions as serializations, not compounds
Chao (1968) considers CCs to be a type of compound, calling them "trans
ient words" under his classification. He distinguishes them from other V+V
compounds, in that they are "synthesizable" rather than "lexical", that is,
their meaning can regularly be recovered compositionally from the meaning
of the two elements. Li and Thompson (1981) take a similar approach,
although they further distinguish between two types of synthesizable V+V
compounds: CCs and Parallel Verb Compounds. Parallel Verb Compounds
are composed of two synonymous or nearly synonymous verbs. They are
the type of verb compound most similar to CCs, in terms of structure and