Serial Verb Constructions in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Serial verb constructions (SVC) have been paid attention to by many researchers. The previous analyses have a problem of incomplete SVC data collected or classifications. This problem will lead to failure of predicting ungrammatical SVCs. This paper provides all possible combinations at the syntactic level. They are classified into temporal, location, causative and manner-and-instrument relationships. This paper argues that the order principle of verb phrases in SVC is a general constraint for all SVC data. The principle manages to predict ungrammatical SVC sentences.