A Semantic Typology of Completives

In Mandarin, it has been claimed that Mandarin lacks inherent bare transitive accomplishment verbs. To entail event culmination, a resultative verbal compound (RVC) construction, such as xiu-hao ‘fix good’, can be used instead of bare verbs. Among these resultative markers, a special subclass consisting of members such as wan ‘finish’, diao ‘drop’, hao ‘good’, cheng ‘succeed’ have been singled out as general completive markers. While in many situations these completive markers can be used more or less synonymously, they nevertheless exhibit subtle differences in their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic distributions. Although these differences have been described quite extensively in the descriptive linguistic literature, they have not been studied quite well in formal semantics.

A recent formal semantic study by Gu (2023) examines the semantic difference between wan ‘finish’ and diao ‘drop’ and claims that these two are maximizers in the time domain and the individual domain respectively, and that wan ‘finish’ denotes termination, while diao ‘drop’ denotes true culmination maximalizing the theme. However, her paper has mostly focused on consumption verbs, and the semantic effects of other completive markers have yet to be explained further.

Mostly agreeing with Gu’s (2023) generalization, this paper modifies and modifies her analysis towards other completive markers. This paper sets up a preliminary framework of the semantic typology of completive markers in Mandarin, by offering a finer examination of the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic distributions of these markers. It shows that Mandarin completive markers can be formally classified by factors such as domains, degrees of completion, directions of change, and event participants measured against. Besides the time domain and the individual domain, this paper discovers that the domain of degrees and the domain of world variables are also possible for the semantics of completives.