Revisit the Resultative Construction in Mandarin Chinese

This study revisits the syntactic derivation of two resultative patterns in Mandarin Chinese: the compounding resultative and the DE-resultative. A splitting light verb structure is examined in these two patterns, both of which contain multiple adjacent light verbs along with feature inheritance. The v-splitting approach is better than a base-generated structure with two separate v heads. One advantage is that it allows us to formulate the analysis in which the root raises to the light verb v* without violating the head movement constraint. It also works well to explain the specificity of the postverbal argument in the resultative construction.