MANDARIN CLAUSE LINKAGE 209productivity, and therefore serve best to illustrate the differences between
compounds and CCs.
3.1 Temporal separation
Verb compounds express a situation where a single action or event is
described by two different names, or where two different actions take place
roughly simultaneously or in no particular order. For example:
(25) jiàoxùn "teach" + "train" "to teach a lesson, to chide"
móca "rub" + "rub" "to rub"
guíhuán "return" + "return" "to return"
hànjiào "yell" + "call" "to yell"
It is clear that in none of the V+V compounds in (25) does the action or
event expressed by Vx occur before that of V 2. Yet with any CR construc
tion, despite the fact that the structure is superficially identical, the event
denoted by Wx must occur before that denoted by V 2 :
(26) kandöng "read" + "understand" "to understand through reading"
qiaopò "hit" + "break" "to break by hitting"
bingsï "sicken" + "die" "die of disease"
In other words, in the examples in (26) reading must precede understand
ing, hitting must precede breaking, and getting sick must precede dying.
Of course it should be argued that this left-to-right sequentiality in CCs
is not an independent phenomenon, but is due to the more basic notion
expressed by the CC, causality. In a CC like kandöng, "reading" precedes
"understanding" because, both in the syntax of Mandarin and in the real
world, "reading" causes "understanding". The notion of causality or pur-
posefulness (purposefulness being attempted causality) presupposes
sequentiality, and (as we saw in the SVCs above), this sequentiality in real-
world events is iconically represented in the order of the Causer-Causee
elements in the syntax. To put it another way, the verbs in CCs are ordered
in a principled way, while those in other V+V compounds are not.
This is not to say that no compounds are ordered according to syntactic
principles. VO compounds are an example of a compound type that follows
the word order principles of clausal syntax. The crucial characteristic of VO
compounds that sets them apart from VO verb phrases, however, is the fact
that they are lexicalized, and not particulary productive. This is more than