The Hybrid Construction of VO and VR in Chinese

Fuzzy set is a powerful methodology for linguistic studies.By means of this concept, this paper identifies a hybrid construction reflecting the features of the construction of both verb-object and verb-resultative.Specifically, the grammatical form of the hybrid construction is verb-object, but the semantic relation of the two constituents is verb-resultative, which refer to a causative event like a transitive verb.The causative meaning licenses a patient noun, but the verb-object overt form disallows this patient noun to be used as an object in post-predicate position.There are several alternative ways to arrange the patient nouns, including the ba construction, the passive construction, the topicalization construction, and the patient subject construction, which may convey different pragmatic values.The present analysis provides a consistent and unified explanation for some highly controversial issues among scholars.