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Abstract
Mandarin categorizes cutting and breaking events on the basis of fine semantic distinctions in the causal action and the caused result. I demonstrate the semantics of Mandarin C&B verbs from the perspective of event encoding and categorization as well as argument structure alternations. Three semantically different types of predicates can be identified: verbs denoting the C&B action subevent, verbs encoding the C&B result subevent, and resultative verb compounds (RVC) that encode both the action and the result subevents. The first verb of an RVC is basically dyadic, whereas the second is monadic. RVCs as a whole are also basically dyadic, and do not undergo detransitivization.
Keywords: cut and break; separation events; verb semantics; Mandarin; resultative verb compounds; event encoding; categorization; argument structure
Received: 2004-12-01
Revised: 2006-07-12
Published Online: 2007-09-25
Published in Print: 2007-09-19
© Walter de Gruyter
