MANDARIN CLAUSE LINKAGE^219an expansion of shu "book", because "brother's book" counts as an
instance of "book" but not of "brother's", while "pick up a pen and write"
is an instance of "pick up a pen" as well as an instance of "write". In other
words, an utterance of "brother's book" could be appropriately reported as
"he said something about a book" but not "he said something about
brother's", while an utterance of "picked up a pen and wrote" could be
reported as either "he said he picked up a pen" or "he said he wrote".
The same problem exists with Chao's description of the complement
relationship, because none of the examples he gives are CCs where both Vj
and V 2 are fully productive lexical verbs. Although the verbs in the exam
ples above could all stand alone without their complements and are clearly
the heads of their respective constructions, the examples below show that
this is not necessarily the case for all complement constructions:
(38) a. Wo kán döng le nà ben shu.
I read understand ASP that CLF book
"I understood that book (by way of reading)."
b. Wo kàn le nà ben shu.
I read ASP that CLF book
"I read that book."
c. Wo dong le nà ben shu.
I understood ASP that CLF book
"I understood that book"
(39) a. Ta bìng si le.
he sick die ASP
"He died of disease."
b. Ta bìng le.
he sick ASP
"He got sick."
c. si le
he die ASP
"He died."
(38) and (39) both show that both the verb and the complement are capable
of standing alone, and that on the basis of optionality neither can reasona
bly be assigned the status of head. Semantically and pragmatically as well,
neither can be assigned priority, in that (38a) and (39a) could be less infor-