An event integration approach to the family of Chinese instrumental constructions

Abstract This study contributes to the similarities and differences of the constructions in the family of Chinese instrumental constructions. It is found that all instrumental constructions conceptually are composed of the instrument-manipulation event, the act-on event and a semantic relation (facilitating or causative) between them and syntactically represented by one clause, while with different patterns of event integration, all instrumental constructions form a continuum in terms of degrees of event integration and Chinese tends to use more compactly integrated instrumental constructions. Theoretically, this study supplements the event integration from 4 aspects: (1) Event integration can be either single-chained or double-chained; (2) Besides explicit argument integration, implicix`t argument integration is also a hub of event integration; (3) Event integration involves not only explicit events but also implicit events; (4) The mismatch between predicates and arguments is essentially one of the linguistic representations of event integration.