Transitivity of a Chinese Verb-Result Compound and Affected Argument of the Result Verb

The Chinese verb-result compound is productive, but its meaning and syntactic behaviors have posed challenges to theoretical and automatic analyses. Theory-wise, the current study proposes that VRs have inherent affecting direction, which argument mapping principles and selectional restrictions, event structures, or the kinds of semantic/pragmatic principles or real-world knowledge proposed by previous researchers do not seem to account for. Application-wise, we predict the VR’s transitivity and whether the result component is predicated of the logical subject or the logical object, based on the transitivity of individual component verbs and the selectional restrictions between component verbs and arguments. Since the transitivity property and selectional restrictions of individual verbs can be annotated in our lexicon, the rules should fare well in automatic processing. Meanwhile, as the rules have been motivated by linguistic theories and have been observed to make correct predictions in most cases, they are worthy of further large-scale testing.