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377-419

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Language

Chinese

Key words

compound verbs, unaccusative verbs, attributive adjectives, Phase Theory, Taiwanese

Abstract

Unlike the rich diversity of compound verbs in Mandarin Chinese, many combinations commonly used in Mandarin are not found in Taiwanese texts and corpora. This paper carefully examines the broadly-defined resultative constructions of Taiwanese compound verbs, including “verb-verb,” “verb-adjective,” and “adjective-verb” combinations that either belong to the predicate-complement structure or follow the “temporal sequence principle” (Tai 1985). It is observed that, in the most conservative dialects of Taiwanese, with few exceptions, the second morpheme in compound verbs is restricted to non-agentive verbs and attributive adjectives. Based on these observations, this paper argues that the broadly-defined resultative constructions in Taiwanese semantically conform to the analysis proposed by L.Cheng et al. (1997), which uses the light verb CAUSE for head movement. Adopting Phase Theory (Chomsky 2000, 2001), we hypothesize that the second morpheme in some combinations faces restrictions during head movement, preventing the compound verb form from completing syntactic operations. This accounts for the absence of certain compound verb combinations in Taiwanese.