Tay (2024): Resultative Expressions in Mandarin Chinese #

This file formalizes Tay's account of why Mandarin V-V resultatives realize their arguments more freely than V-de resultatives and English resultatives. A V-V resultative is a synthetic compound built in morphology, V1-∅-V2, so its components are inaccessible to syntactic operations, chapter 2: a locative can modify V1 of a V-de resultative but not of the compound, (45)–(46), and repeatedly has only the whole-event reading on the compound, (41)–(44). The null affix ∅ introduces a macroevent containing a causing event described by V1 and a caused event described by V2, inherits every argument of V2, and existentially closes every argument of V1 (110), nullAffix; the variant ∅+C also names the crucial contributory factor of the macroevent (111), nullAffixC. The factor is a function of the macroevent, so a change has one, ccf_unique, and V1's arguments are closed, so nothing relates the arguments of the compound to those of V1, nullAffix_of: the external argument can be V1's agent (131)–(132) or its theme (133)–(134), the internal argument need not be V1's agent (202)–(206), and the sole argument of an unaccusative compound can be V1's agent (219), which is why Mandarin has subject-oriented resultatives without a reflexive.

What does constrain the external argument is the Onset Condition of [Kim24], (141): an event integrated into the macroevent of a simplex causative is the initial event of its causal chain, Model.Onset. The factor is a participant in that initial event, Model.CcfInitial, and V1's event is integrated, so the factor is a participant in V1's event, participant_of_nullAffixC: no pure causers (146)–(149), while subject matters are participants (150)–(151). On the causal chain of chén 'sink' (136), jī-chén 'strike-sink' names the onset and *chōng-chén 'rush-sink' an event downstream of it, (137)–(140), onsetCondition_strike and not_onsetCondition_rush: on a model of (136) the first meets the Onset Condition and puts the Russian forces in V1's event, ji_chen_participant, and the second violates it, not_sinkingModel_rush_onset. The rows carry the paper's reading of the external argument, and a transitive compound is ungrammatical exactly where that reading is a pure causer, ungrammatical_iff_pureCauser. The macroevent must contain the two subevents rather than identify or nest them: in shè-sǐ 'shoot dead' (107) the shooting and the dying overlap at the moment of contact only, so their traces are neither equal nor nested, shooting_trieventive. Chapter 8's typology varies whether the null head merges in morphology, whether the result X can be a verb, and whether a transitive resultative takes an intransitive X; the third follows from whether the language's change-of-state verbs alternate, since an intransitive one that does not carries no factor and the null head supplies it, ResultativeType.intransitiveX, with Mandarin's pò (684)–(686) the witness, po_not_alternating.

Implementation notes #

Predicates take their arguments as tuples Fin n → D, so a family of null affixes indexed by the arities of V1 and V2 is one definition. The causal relation, the factor, the participant relation and the causal chain of each macroevent, (136), are the primitives of a Model; the thesis takes the causal relation to be Lewis's counterfactual causation and leaves its characterization open. Events are partially ordered by causal precedence, the initial event of a chain is its least event, and the Onset Condition is [Kim24]'s, Kim2024.OnsetCondition. The model of (136) draws the chain as a relation of immediate causation (SinkingEvent.Causes), ordered by its reflexive transitive closure, so the macroevent, no link in the chain, is unordered with respect to its subevents. Temporal traces are rational intervals. The compounds are entries of Fragments/Mandarin/Resultatives.lean, which record no orientation: the apparent subject-oriented transitives chī-bǎo (3) and qí-lèi (330) are the hybrid resultatives of chapter 4, whose postverbal phrase is an argument of V2, and that chapter, the V-de construction's syntax (chapter 6), the case against the No Argument Theory (chapter 5) and the null head ∅+C+B for adjectival X (693) are not formalized.

Tay (2024): Resultative Expressions in Mandarin Chinese #

Implementation notes #

References #

The null affix (chapter 2, section 3.3) #

The Onset Condition (chapter 3, section 2.2) #

The causal chain of chén 'sink', (136)–(140) #

The external argument in the data (chapter 3, sections 2.1–2.2) #

Trieventive structure (chapter 2, section 3.3) #

The compound in morphology (chapter 2, section 2) #

Typology (chapter 8) #