A Syntactic Account of the Direct Object Restriction in Chinese

Abstract

This paper proposes a syntactic account for the Direct Object Restriction, which states that resultatives must be object-oriented. The restriction is absent in the v-v resultative constructions in Chinese because the head movement from the resultative to the matrix verb extends the control domain, making both the subject and the object of the matrix verb available as an antecedent of the subject of the resultative. By contrast, in the de resultative constructions, as well as the resultative constructions in English, there is no head movement from the resultative to the matrix verb, and thus the subject of the resultative is controlled by only the nearest argument of the matrix verb, i.e., the direct object.