透過語段理論解釋臺語複合動詞的組合限制

Explaining the Combinatory Restrictions of Taiwanese Compound Verbs through Phase Theory

不同於華語複合動詞的豐富多樣，許多慣用於華語的組合，不見於臺語的文本及語料庫。本文仔細梳理複合動詞中廣義的動結式，即「動動」、「動形」、「形動」組合中屬述補結構或兩個詞素間符合「時間順序原則」(Tai 1985)的不同組合，並指出在臺語最保守的方言裡，除了少數例外，複合動詞的第二個詞素僅限不帶施事者外論元的動詞與具屬性用法的形容詞。基於前述觀察，本文指出臺語的廣義動結式在語意上都符合L. Cheng et al. (1997)以輕動詞CAUSE做主要語移位的分析，就理論上而言，可採語段理論(Chomsky 2000, 2001)假設某些組合中的第二個詞素，在進行主要語移位時會遭受限制，以致複合動詞的型態無法完成句法運作，因而呈現部分複合動詞的組合不見容於臺語的現象。

Unlike the rich diversity of compound verbs in Mandarin Chinese, many combinations commonly used in Mandarin are not found in Taiwanese texts and corpora. This paper carefully examines the broadly-defined resultative constructions of Taiwanese compound verbs, including“verb-verb,”“verb-adjective,”and“adjective-verb”combinations that either belong to the predicate-complement structure or follow the“temporal sequence principle”(Tai 1985). It is observed that, in the most conservative dialects of Taiwanese, with few exceptions, the second morpheme in compound verbs is restricted to non-agentive verbs and attributive adjectives. Based on these observations, this paper argues that the broadly-defined resultative constructions in Taiwanese semantically conform to the analysis proposed by L. Cheng et al. (1997), which uses the light verb CAUSE for head movement. Adopting Phase Theory (Chomsky 2000, 2001), we hypothesize that the second morpheme in some combinations faces restrictions during head movement, preventing the compound verb form from completing syntactic operations. This accounts for the absence of certain compound verb combinations in Taiwanese.