A Comparative Study on Mandarin and Cantonese Resultative Verb Compounds

A Comparative Study on Mandarin and Cantonese Resultative Verb Compounds Helena Yan Ping Lau Sophia Yat Mei Lee Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies The Hong Kong Polytechnic University The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Hong Kong Hong Kong helena.lau@connect.polyu.hk ym.lee@polyu.edu.hk Abstract This paper explores the conditions where Mandarin RVCs can be preserved in their Cantonese counterparts. Six types of Mandarin RVCs – ergatives, unergatives, accusatives, causatives, pseudo-passives and object- fronting – have been examined. Modifications have been made for certain kinds of RVCs that are usually misclassified. The analysis has been done at both the lexical and syntactic levels. At the lexical level, the concept of ‘strong resultative’ and ‘weak resultative’ has been adduced to support the idea that indirect causation cannot be expressed by RVC in Cantonese. At the syntactic level, the presentations of the same RVCs falling into different sentence types are illustrated. Since the structure of Mandarin RVCs are often restricted in Cantonese, three substitutive constructions have been introduced for presenting the same resultatives in Cantonese. 1 Introduction Resultative verb compound (RVC) has been a well-ventilated topic in Modern Chinese linguistics due to its ubiquitous occurrence in Chinese especially Mandarin. A resultative verb compound in Chinese is composed of two elements, with the second element (V2) denoting the result of the action indicated by the first element (V1) (Thompson 1973, Lu 1977, Li and Thompson 1981, Shi 2002)1. As one of the main varieties of Chinese, Cantonese seems to be closely-related to Mandarin. There are, however, some remarkable differences between them in terms of the usage. An example of Mandarin RVC construction is shown in (1), with a syntactically parallel yet ill-formed sentence in Cantonese illustrated in (2). (1) 我 跑丟-了 車票 1.SG run lost-ASP ticket ‘I lost the ticket as I ran.’ (2) *我 跑跌-咗 張 車飛 1.SG run lost-ASP CL ticket Since RVCs in Cantonese are found to be less productive than they are in Mandarin, most of the previous works have been dedicated to the study of Mandarin Chinese, neglecting numerous concerns regarding Cantonese RVCs. Under what circumstances can the Mandarin RVCs be preserved in their Cantonese counterparts? What are the factors of prohibition of RVCs in Cantonese? What methods will be used when RVCs are not allowed in the corresponding sentences in Cantonese? These are the questions that motivate the current research. In this study, we attempt to provide a systematic pattern of how resultatives are presented when the corresponding Mandarin RVCs are not allowed in 1 Since ‘V1’ and ‘V2’ are widely used as the first and the second predicates of RVCs in previous studies, these terms are adopted in this paper. PACLIC 29 231 29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation pages 231 - 239 Shanghai, China, October 30 - November 1, 2015 Copyright 2015 by Helena Yan Ping Lau and Sophia Yat Mei Lee Cantonese, by examining six types of Mandarin RVCs, namely ergatives, unergatives, accusatives, causatives, pseudo-passives, and object-fronting. 2 Related …

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