Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

230 MARK HANSELL

friends, teachers and colleagues, however blame for any errors of fact or

infelicities of analysis I must reserve for myself.

1. Because the focus of this paper is on the relationship between the two verbs in a
   Complement Construction, I have tended to ignore those CCs in which V 2 is not
   a full verb semantically (i.e. cases where it has become grammaticalized and
   "bleached" of some of its meaning when it occurs in a CC, or in a few cases where
   it doesn't ever occur as a main verb. Some examples:
   
   
   1. Phase Complements — words like wán "finish", dào "complete suc­
      cessfully", jiu ("long time") that tell how far along from beginning to
      end the action is.
   
   
   2. Directional Complements — words like lai "come", qù "go", jin
      "enter", chu "emerge", etc. that are appended to the end of many
      verbs of motion and locomotion.
   
   
   3. Complements of "Success" — complements that are restricted to use
      with a certain subset of V1s, expressing the notion of successfully
      accomplishing the action expressed by the verb. For example, jiàn ("to
      perceive", used with verbs of perception), zhù ("dwell, stay", used with
      verbs that involve placement of an object), zháo "to get" and dào "to
      arrive", used with verbs that involve seeking something.
      These other Complement types are all of the syntactic form Wx + Comp, just as
      CR is Wl + V 2 , and Potential Complements are formed in the same way, with a bu
      or de inserted between V\ and what follows.
      All of the above Complement types share many syntactic and semantic
      characteristics with the CR construction; in fact the first and third types quite
      transparently were originally CRs that became grammaticalized through frequent
      usage. However, since they lack some of the more interesting features of CRs with
      full V 2 s, such as the ability to increase valence, they will not be further investi­
      gated here. See Thompson (1973) for a detailed treatment of CRs whose V 2 s are
      partially or fully grammaticalized.
   
   
   
   


2. This might be expected to create ambiguity when objectless verbs are serialized in
   a minimal Juxtaposition construction. For instance, a Juxtaposition expressing
   alternating actions like "drink and dance" would mimic a CR in terms of V -I- V
   structure if such verbs were monomorphemically realized. The most common
   form of intransitive verbs or verbs with unspecified objects in Mandarin, however,
   is Verb + Cognate Object. While it is commonly recognized that such a construc­
   tion serves to add phonological bulk to the usually monosyllabic verb, in the case
   of verb serializations it also serves to distinguish SVCs from CCs. For example:
   hè jiu "to drink"
   drink liquor
   tiào wu "to dance"
   jump dance