The Prosodic History of Chinese Resultatives *

Abstract

From a historical perspective, this paper shows that resultatives in Modern Chinese are the result of the development of Chinese phonological structures. Initially, due to the devoicing effect of the causative prefix *s-, Old Chinese developed a voicing alternation in intransitive/transitive verbs. Later, the loss of this alternation triggered the appearance of ‘V NP V’ constructions. Owing to the change of its syllabic structures, Chinese witnessed a historic foot shift: namely, a shift from a bimoraic foot to a disyllabic foot. In order to meet the prosodic requirement, ‘V NP V’ constructions in Middle Chinese developed into two forms of resultatives over a long period of time: that is, V-DE constructions and V-V compounds. The reason why both V-DE constructions and V-V compounds can be found in Modern Chinese lies in information structuring. Chinese is an end-focus language, in which the end of a sentence carries the natural focus. The coexistence of V-DE constructions and V-V compounds satisfies the need to express different emphases.