MANDARIN CLAUSE LINKAGE 231
hë jiu tiào wu "to drink and dance"
drink liquor jump dance
he tiào
drink jumpChao's (1968) metaphor of "ions" is quite apt here. Two naked verbs cannot have
any object intervening if they are to be linked by the tightest type of bond (the CR
construction). Otherwise they need something to attatch to, either a true object if
transitive or a cognate object, to avoid becoming free-floating "ions". Even such
a prototypically intransitive verb as "sleep" has a cognate object [CO] in Manda
rin, preventing any confusion as to which of the following sentences is a SVC and
which is a CR:
shuì jiào chi fan Juxtaposition SVC
sleep co eat rice "sleep and eat" (note: in this case, "rice" functions
as the cognate object of eat — chïfàn could mean to
eat anything, not necessarily rice.)
shuì bâo Complement of Result
sleep full/sated "to sleep one's fill/ to one's heart's content"
The pretransitive bà construction is not obligatory in (34). Various factors beyond
the scope of this study influence choice of bà vs. unmarked word order in sen
tences where both are possible. The main point about bä and CCs is that CRs
behave exactly the same as monomorphemic verbs with respect to bä, while PCs,
being unrealized, cannot take the bä construction (section 2.2).
This use of huài with the aspect marker le added could be better understood as the
achievement verb "to go bad" rather than as the stative verb "to be bad".
The modal néng "can" can occur redundantly with an affirmative PC, but no other
combination of Modal + PC is possible.
The Complement of Degree is an extremely complicated problem that is simply
too big for the scope of this paper. Part of the problem is the protean particle de,
which serves a variety of functions in Mandarin. De can also be written with three
different characters; whether or not they are different homophonous particles or
even how many homophonous des there are is problematic. Some of the functions
marked by de: Potential Complement, Complement of Degree, Adverbial
Marker, Genitive, Nominalizer, Complementizer. Three different cases of Com
plement of Degree-type constructions:
(i) Tä zhäng de hén kuài. Adverbial usage
he grow PART very fast
"He grows very fast."
(ii) Tä zhäng de hén gäo. Resultative
he grow PART very tall
"He is/has grown very tall."