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  • The establishment of Modern Chinese grammar: The formation of the resultative construction and its effects by Yuzhi Shi
  • Lan Zhang
The establishment of Modern Chinese grammar: The formation of the resultative construction and its effects. By Yuzhi Shi. (Studies in language comparison series 59.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. 262. ISBN 1588112039. $108 (Hb).

This book investigates how the resultative construction was formed in Chinese grammar and its effects on the lexicon, morphology, and syntax of Chinese. The resultative construction is a widely observed structure in Modern Chinese, which consists of a verb plus an adjective or an intransitive verb expressing the resulting state of the action.

An issue central to the resultative construction is the determination of the structure from which it developed. This book identifies the separable resultative structure as its source, which had an object, adverbial, or a negative element between the verb (V) and the resultative (R). The intervening elements were often omitted, which created adjacency between V and R. Through reanalysis, the boundary between the two was lost and they fused together. The resultative construction was thus formed. The book also provides a chronology of the formation of the resultative structure based on vernacular texts of different times.

The motivation for the V and R to be fused involves several factors, the most fundamental of which is disyllabification. The Chinese phonological system underwent a simplification throughout history, which motivated disyllabification to reduce resultant homophony and restore distinctive phonological representations. The V and R, which were often adjacent, became fused together like a disyllabic word. The more frequently a verb collocates with a particular resultative, the more likely they are to become fused into a single constituent. The necessary structural condition for the V and R to be fused is the loss of the connective er between two verbal constituents. One of the outcomes of this loss was the possibility for the V and R to be adjacent to each other, which was necessary in order for them to be fused. The book also discusses the semantic factors in the development of the resultative construction. Those that were fused together first were the ones that expressed a typical ‘action-result’ relation. The R that defines a telic state for V has a high degree of semantic relevance, and this semantic relevance also plays a critical role in the fusion of the two elements.

The book then introduces the effect of the formation of the resultative structure on Chinese grammar, including the aspects of lexicon, morphology, and syntax. During the formation of the resultative structure, many VR phrases were lexicalized into verb compounds. Also, some resultatives further developed into verb suffixes or clitics, including the three major aspect markers in Chinese: perfective -le, durative -zhe, and experiential -guo. With the increase of VR structures, there arose a syntactic requirement for the predicate to be semantically bounded, and bare predicates became greatly limited in their distribution. In addition, through analogy, other linguistic forms expressing results of an action are like resultatives limited to postverbal position; and those expressing concomitant features occur in preverbal position. This distribution was established not long after the emergence of the resultative construction.

The book also provides several case studies based on empirical data to support its theory. The frequency of the occurrence of the relevant structures during a certain time is also often provided.

Lan Zhang
University of South Carolina
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