The Possibility of Weak V-DE-(NP)-A Constructions in Chinese

According to Washio’s (1997) strong and weak resultative analysis, Chinese resultative V-A-(NP) compounds allow both strong and weak resultative constructions while Chinese V-DE-(NP)-A constructions allow only strong resultative constructions, i.e., weak V-DE-(NP)-A constructions are not accepted in these constructions when the result predicate is a stage-level predicate + le. However, it can be found that these ungrammatical weak V-DE-(NP)-A constructions are possible to be grammatical in Chinese when the result predicate is an individual-level predicate or is modified by a degree word. A natural question to ask here is why so. In the paper, I will suggest a reason for it in terms of the function of DE and the aspect marker le in Chinese resultative constructions and the syntactic structures of V-DE-(NP)-A constructions