A Study of Atypical Object-Taking Constructions in Modern Chinese Focusing on the Possessor–Patient Construction with Intransitive Verbs and Adjectives

This study investigates the atypical Chinese construction lingzhushubinju (領主屬賓句), in which unaccusative verbs and adjectives take an object, by analyzing its actual usage to clarify how the construction functions. The analysis shows that lingzhushubinju commonly follows the pattern NP₁ + V/A + le + NP₂, highlighting events of existence or change based on a possessive–subordinate relationship between subject and object. However, the way events are presented and the semantic focus differ by construction type. In verbal constructions such as NP₁ + si le fuqin (“NP₁’s father died”), temporal adverbials like sansui (“three years old”), cong xiao (“since childhood”), and jiu (“already”) frequently precede the subject, emphasizing both the childhood timing and the emotional impact of loss. In contrast, NP₁ + lai le keren (“NP₁ had guests come”) occurs infrequently and more often appears as existential sentences with locative subjects, as in jiali lai le keren (“guests came to the house”), showing stronger affinity with existential constructions. Adjectival constructions such as hong le lian (“face turned red”) or bai le tou (“hair turned white”) feature adjectives denoting color or state change as predicates and integrate both subject and object within the event frame. The predicate combines directly with the object to depict the change of a body part, while temporal or degree adverbs such as huran (“suddenly”) and weiwei (“slightly”) further refine the suddenness and emotional coloring of the change. These findings demonstrate that lingzhushubinju is an independent event-centered construction in which unaccusative verbs and adjectives—traditionally considered objectless—can under certain conditions combine directly with an object. In particular, adjectival lingzhushubinju highlights the subject not merely as a possessor but as an experiencer of change and emotion, forming an important component of the syntactic system of modern Chinese.