Causal VVs in Mandarin

Alexander Williams

Abstract:

Many verbal predicates in Mandarin have two parts that can be separated by at most the markers of the positive and negative potential form, de and bu (Chao 1968; Hashimoto 1971; Thompson 1973; Li and Thompson 1981). Call such predicates VVs (Lu 1977), committing to nothing with this name. VVs come in various types, to be reviewed brie!y in Section 3. This chapter will concentrate on VVs that I will call causal (Li and Thompson 1981), such as those in (1) and (2). These imply a causal relation between two distinct events, those of the "rst and second verb. For example, (1a) implies that a kicking caused a snapping and (2a) implies that a chilling caused an illness. This chapter surveys the interpretation and syntax of causal VVs, focusing on the former. The terms of discussion are established in Section 2. Section 3 distinguishes non-causal VVs, with Section 4 then discussing the relations between the two parts of the causal VV. A quick sketch of the potential form is given in Section 5. Section 6 concerns the interpretation of the subject and object – the
most theoretically provocative aspect of this construction – followed in Section 7 by two accounts of the data. Some further aspects of VV syntax are noted in Section 8, before the conclusion. This review relies heavily on many groundbreaking
studies, particularly Chao (1968), Hashimoto (1971), Thompson (1973), Li and Thompson (1981), Lü (1986), Ma (1987), Huang (1988, 1992), Li (1990,1995), and Sybesma (1999).