The Syntactic Word-formation of Mandarin Resultative Verb Compounds from the Perspective of Headedness

Which element of a Mandarin resultative verb compound serves as the head has long been a rather controversial issue on Chinese grammar. Taking the internal structure and formation mechanism of resultative verb compounds into consideration, the present paper argues that such compounds are headless in the sense that they lack a syntactic head. Syntactically, a head projects its syntactic properties to the compound and gives its category to the whole phrase. It is assumed in this paper that resultative verb compounds involve the merging of two roots and thus their formation is not subject to the Headedness Principle. More specifically, two roots undergo a symmetric merger to form a root complex, and then the resultant merges with a defining category to form a closed unit. Given that the root lacks full-fledged syntactic features and cannot determine the category of the whole construction, a natural conclusion is that there is no syntactic head in Mandarin resultative verb compounds. However, this fact does not challenge the assumption that word formation obeys general syntactic rules.