Selectional Restrictions on Mandarin Resultatives: A Degree Semantics Approach

This study investigates the selectional restrictions on Mandarin resultatives and their underlying roots. The results of the investigation of the factors, including the types of resultative complement in terms of scales, the situation aspect of main predicates, and the direction of complements, together with a comparison of the same phenomenon in English, reveal that Mandarin resultatives exhibit fewer restrictions. Specifically, every type of complements can occur with non-stative and atelic predicates that are either durational or punctual, and the direction of complements seems to have little effect. Previous studies fail to explain this puzzle. This study addresses it by considering not only scale structures of both predicates and their complements but also the effect of elements with a change-of-state sense. Drawing upon degree semantics, it posits that the combination of complements and the elements with change-of-state sense generates a measure of change function, which provides a definite standard of comparison. This value and the maximal degree entailed by some resultative complements can explain selectional restrictions on Mandarin resultatives. In sum, this study reviews the problems in previous descriptions of Mandarin resultatives, formulates the semantics of Mandarin resultatives, and offers a reasonable account of their selectional restrictions under degree semantics.