Verb-object compounds and idioms in Chinese

Abstract

This paper addresses central issues about the nature of a construction in the Chinese language that is referred to as Verb-Object Compounds (VOCs). It has long been noted that the relationship between the two or more morphemes of VOCs is partly morphological and partly syntactic in the sense that, on the one hand, they do combine to form a ‘word-like unit’, but on the other hand, some degree of separation is possible between the two parts [4, 8, 9, 10, 12, 16, 17, 22, among others]. The VOC has triggered intense interest and rigorous research on the issue of wordhood in Chinese due to its disharmonious behaviour shown in the two separate modules of syntax and morphology. However, these previous discussions mainly focus on the criteria that can identify a word in Chinese. This paper, rather than belabouring the issue of refining these criteria or proposing new ones, centres on the fact that this type of compound exhibits properties in syntax, as well as lexical features in morphology and semantics. The description and analysis of the syntactic and morphological characteristics of VOCs then provide a foundation for a generalized account of the representation of VOCs and Verb-Object (VO) idioms within the grammatical framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG).