On the Head Issue of Mandarin Resultative Verb Compounds from the Perspective of Generative Constructionism

Concerning the head issue of Mandarin Resultative Verb Compounds(RVCs), there has been a dispute between Unified Head Hypothesis and Separated Head Hypothesis and one between Lexical Head Hypothesis and Functional Head Hypothesis.This paper argues for an approach whereby a functional head serves as both the semantic and syntactic head.With regard to the problems facing the current Functional Head Hypothesis, we propose, based on the Generative Constructionism, that a Mandarin RVC conveys an integrated event, whose semantic head is the eventive predicate CHANGE.With that, we propose a new functional head v_CHANGE, which is the syntactic counterpart of CHANGE, serves as the head of the event syntax of Mandarin RVCs.The lexical items consisting of RVCs, namely V1 and V2, enter the syntax as roots and have no projections, with V1 adjoined with v_CHANGE by means of Manner Conflation and V2 moved into v_CHANGE by Incorporation.