On the Correspondence between Chinese Word Structure and Sentence Structure: A Case Study of Chinese Compound Verbs

Abstract

Our discussion is centered around the derivational mechanism and it's restriction on the formation of two types of compound verbs (i.e., verb-complement types and verb-object types) in Chinese. Based on the correspondence between Chinese sentence structure and word structure in terms of grammatical relation and liner order of their constituents, this paper attempts to show that these two types of compound verbs are better treated with highly lexicalized syntactic operations, others would follow morphological rules and process in the lexicon.