Compound vs phrasal resultatives: the view from Mandarin Chinese

Abstract This paper argues against a uniform syntactic analysis of V-V compound resultatives and V- de phrasal resultatives in Mandarin Chinese. I propose instead that V-V resultatives are built in morphology while V- de resultatives are built in syntax. My proposal predicts that V-V and V- de resultatives will exhibit distinct behaviour with respect to a number of syntactic processes. (i) V- de resultatives are accessible to syntactic operations while V-V resultatives are not. (ii) Since obligatory arguments must be projected in a syntactic structure, V1 must project its arguments in V- de resultatives but not in V-V resultatives. Furthermore, it seems that these differences in argument structure between compound and phrasal resultatives are observed in languages other than Mandarin. These differences cannot be captured within a theoretical framework that makes no reference in syntax to some notion of a “word”. Therefore, to the extent that it is on the right track, my proposal provides evidence for a distinction between word syntax and phrasal syntax.