Syntactic and semantic analysis of the S+VO₁+O₂ construction in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Archaic Chinese, the verbal VO compounds are unable to take any additional NP object due to their inherent nominal morpheme, i.e., O. However, Modern Mandarin Chinese has a special construction known as the S+VO1+O2 Construction. This construction was first discussed in the 1980s and has become increasingly prevalent in various forms of the media such as the internet and newspapers. The key issues of this construction are the types of semantic roles involved and its syntactic properties. Accordingly, this study aims to explore the answers to these questions. Based on the Corpus of the Beijing Language and Culture University Chinese Corpus (BCC), this study provides a detailed description and analysis of the constituents of the S+VO1+O2 Construction. Building upon the agent and experiencer semantic roles of the subject, this study further subdivides the object O2’s corresponding semantic roles subclasses, while also considering both active and passive voices. In addition, this study proposes two thematic hierarchies for the S+VO1+O2 Construction, one for the subject and one for the object, which differ from the classical thematic hierarchy proposed by Bresnan (2001: 307). Furthermore, due to the similarities in word order and constituents, the S+VO1+O2 Construction and the Double Object Construction (DOC) can be easily confused, making it meaningful to compare and contrast between these two constructions. This study indicates that while both constructions share some similarities, they are two completely different structures with divergent syntactic properties. In general, this study explores the semantic roles and syntactic properties of the S+VO1+O2 Construction, both in terms of overall structure and specific components. It is hoped that this study will inspire further discussion on the properties of the unconventional Chinese S+VO1+O2 Construction and its relationship with other constructions.