A comparative study on Mandarin and Cantonese resultative verb compounds

This paper explores the conditions where Mandarin RVCs can be preserved in their Cantonese counterparts. Six types of Mandarin RVCs - ergatives, unergatives, accusatives, causatives, pseudo-passives and object-fronting - have been examined. Modifications have been made for certain kinds of RVCs that are usually misclassified. The analysis has been done at both the lexical and syntactic levels. At the lexical level, the concept of 'strong resultative' and 'weak resultative' has been adduced to support the idea that indirect causation cannot be expressed by RVC in Cantonese. At the syntactic level, the presentations of the same RVCs falling into different sentence types are illustrated. Since the structure of Mandarin RVCs are often restricted in Cantonese, three substitutive constructions have been introduced for presenting the same resultatives in Cantonese.