Resultative Serial Verb Constructions in Shaoxing Wu and Mandarin Resultative Verb Compounds: a Parametric View

Abstract

This paper addresses the controversy as to whether different types of resultatives can be subsumed under a unified analysis, drawing on new data from the Shaoxing Wu dialect (a Northern Wu dialect spoken in the prefecture-level city of Shaoxing in Zhejiang province), whose most productive form of resultatives is split resultatives, in the form of V(erb)- O(bject)-R(esult). This word order is generally assumed to be the underlying form of Mandarin resultative verb compounds in the order of V-R-O. On the grounds that the object of the resultative construction must be shared by the cause-denoting verb and the result predicate, and that the cause event and the result event form a single event, we argue that Shaoxing resultatives are a type of resultative serial verb construction and can be assigned a VP-shell structure à la Larson (1991). On the theoretical side, based on the observation that resultatives in Shaoxing Wu and Mandarin Chinese differ extensively with respect to the thematic restrictions on the subject, possible combinations of V1 and R, and the ‘tightness’ of the relation between the causing and caused events, which are unexpected due to their parallelism outside the domain of resultative formation, we argue against the uniform analyses that assign the same underlying structure to the two types of resultatives or derive them in the same way, and adopt a modular view on the formation of resultative complex predicates, which is parameterized in the way that while resultatives in the form of serial verb construction in Shaoxing Wu are derived in the syntax, resultative compounds in Mandarin Chinese are better analyzed as lexically formed causative verbs.