Lexicalization, Separation and transitivity: A comparative study of Mandarin VO compound Variations

31st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC 31), pages 354–362 Cebu City, Philippines, November 16-18, 2017 Copyright c⃝2017 Menghan Jiang and Chu-Ren Huang Lexicalization, Separation and transitivity: A comparative study of Mandarin VO compound Variations Menghan Jiang and Chu-Ren Huang Department of CBS, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University menghan.jiang@connect.polyu.hk; churen.huang@polyu.edu.hk Abstract Our study takes a comparable corpus-based statistical approach, to empirically examine the correlation between transitivity and separation ability for VO compound in Mandarin Chinese. The results of the two studies show that inseparable VOs are more likely to be used in a transitive way, compared to separable ones. In addition, there is a statistical negative correlation between transitivity and separation ability, i.e. the more a VO sequence is lexicalized, the less likely it can take an object. Our paper further empirically proves that the grammatical variations of VO compound are to a large extent depend on the degree of lexicalization. The differences in separation and transitivity between Mainland and Taiwan actually indicate the different stages that Mainland and Taiwan VO compounds are located in the continuum of lexicalization. 1 Introduction In Modern Chinese, there is an increasing number of disyllabic VO compounds which gradually changed from intransitive to transitive verbs. The transitive VO compounds can take another constituent (e.g., a word, a phrase or a sentence) as their objects, and yield the configuration of [VO1+O2], such as 投资 房地产 touzi fnagdichan throw_money_real-estate ‘invest in real estate’, 进 军 美 国 市 场 jinjun meiguo shichang march_towards_American_market ‘march towards American market’. This phenomenon has attracted the interests of numbers of scholars in Chinese linguistics (e.g., Liu, 1998a, 1998b; Gao, 1998 among others). One research question that often being addressed is the transition requirement of VO compounds (i.e. what kind of VO is easier to be transferred from intransitive to transitive). Numbers of researches claim that for a VO compound, the ability of taking the object is closely related to its lexical status. The higher degree of lexical status, the more possibility it can take the object and be used transitively (e.g., Liu, 1998a; Luo, 1998; Gao, 1998). Actually, this is in accordance with Brinton and Traugott (2005) which claims that lexicalization is to use a syntactic construction or word formation as a new form, which cannot be completely derivable or predictable from the constituents of the construction or the word formation pattern. It is also well known that the degree of lexicalization can be tested through separation test (e.g., Her, 1997; Liu, 1998a). The easier it can be separated, the higher degree of its lexicalization. In fact, this is related to the ‘Lexical Integrity Hypothesis’ proposed by Huang (1984: 60): no phrase-level rule may affect a proper sub-part of a word. Since a VO compound as a word is thus a lexical unit whose internal structure is of a V+O (Her, 1997), and an important feature that distinguishes a lexical units from a phrase is the lexical integrity. Therefore based on the previous discussions, it has become …

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