The Co-occurrence of Two Delimiters: An Investigation of Mandarin Chinese Resultatives

The Co-occurrence of Two Delimiters: An Investigation of Mandarin Chinese Resultatives Jingxia Lin and Chu-Ren Huang Department of Chinese & Bilingual Studies The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong ctjlin@polyu.edu.hk, churen.huang@inet.polyu.edu.hk Abstract. Tenny (1987, 1994: 79) proposes the Single Delimiting Constraint that the event described by a verb can only be delimited once (cf. Goldberg 1991, 1995). The constraint applies the effects of delimitedness as an aspectual property to the mapping of semantics and syntax, and explains why sentences with two delimiters (e.g., *Martha wiped the table dry1 clean2 Tenny 1994: 80) are unacceptable. The constraint is challenged with English counterexamples and modified by Matsumoto (2006) and Zhou (2008). However, this study proposes that the constraint holds for Mandarin Chinese resultatives, whereas the revised constraints do not. Furthermore, we point out that while two independent delimiters usually do not co-occur in Chinese, a second delimiter that further specifies or reinforces the endpoint/ endstate denoted by the first delimiter is allowed (cf. Tenny 1994, Goldberg 1991). The results of this study may shed light on event structure of Chinese. Keywords: Single Delimiting Constraint; Unique Path Constraint; Mandarin Chinese resultatives 1 Introduction Delimitednes1 refers to “the property of an event’s having a distinct, definite and inherent endpoint in time” (Tenny 1994: 4). For instance, He ate an orange describes a delimited event because eating an orange has a definite endpoint, that is, when the whole orange is eaten; in contrast, the event described in He ran is undelimited because a running event can take place forever if no endpoint is explicitly expressed (Tenny 1994: 4). Tenny (1987, 1994: 79) proposes the Single Delimiting Constraint (SDC) that an event described by a verb can be delimited only once. A similar constraint the Unique Path Constraint (UPC) is proposed by Goldberg (1991: 368-369, 1995) that only one “distinct path” can be predicated of an argument denoting a physical object. The path in the UPC can be understood in two senses, either as a path for physical motion, or as a metaphorical path where the object undergoes a change of state. And the notion of a distinct path entails that the physical object cannot be in two locations or in two states at a time, or in both a location and a state at a time (ibid.). Both the SDC and the UPC apply the effects of delimitedness as an aspectual property to the mapping of semantics and syntax, and explain why sentences such as (1) are not acceptable. (1) a. *Shirley sailed into the kitchen into the garden. (Goldberg 1991: 368) (two locations) 1 Delimitedness is also called “measuring-out” by Tenny (1994) or “scale” by Hay et al. (1999). Copyright 2011 by Jingxia Lin and Chu-Ren Huang 25th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, pages 519–524 519 b. *Martha wiped the table dry1 clean2. (Tenny 1994: 80) (two states) c. *Sam kicked Bill black and blue1 out of the room2. (Goldberg 1991: 368) (a location+ a state) Before introducing counterexamples to the …

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