216 MARK HANSELL
serves to make it definite, "the wine", as opposed to the indefinite "wine"
in (35'a).)
Teng (1975) proposes a formalized system for dealing with cases like
(35'), wherein each verb has its argument structure specified in terms of
case roles, and each argument may be further subcategorized for other rel
evant categories such as animacy. The verb in (35'), hè "to drink" must be
specified as taking an animate agent and a patient. Thus although jiu
"wine" appears before the verb in (35'c) (in normal subject position), its
inanimateness makes it ineligible for agenthood, and it can only be inter
preted as a topicalized object (undergoer).
CCs require the same kind of mechanism for semantic interpretation,
and the phenomenon exhibited by (35') is possible with a CR construction
as well:
(36) a. Tä chuän pò le y If .
he wear ragged ASP clothes
"He wore out the clothes."
b. Tä chuän pò le. (when object is understood)
he wear ragged ASP
"He wore (it) out."
Yïfu chuän pò le.
clothes wear ragged ASP
"The clothes are/were worn out."
Obviously the same specifications of thematic roles that made jiu unam
biguously the object in (35'c), also make yïfu unambiguously the object in
(36c). One could perhaps deal with this problem by treating the CC con
struction chuanpò just like a lexical verb, by assigning thematic roles to its
arguments at the lexical level. The problem with this approach is quite clear
— while lexical verbs like he in (35') are numerous, they nevertheless con
stitute a closed set, making individual specification of their argument struc
tures a conceivable solution. The CR construction, however, is very pro
ductive, making for an open set of possible CR verb serializations, meaning
that individual specification is impossible. An alternative strategy would be
to specify the argument structure of the specific types of CCs. For example,
sentences (36a-c) could be accounted for by a rule that says "any CR con
sisting of V1 (transitive) + V 2 (intransitive) will have two arguments, a sub
ject (actor) and object (undergoer)". Such an approach would allow specifi-