The syntactic variety and semantic unity of the V de resultative construction in Mandarin Chinese

The V de resultative construction has been an intriguing issue in Chinese linguistics. Theories have been put forth regarding what the morpheme de (here called de(result) to avoid confusion) does in this construction. In this article, the preexisting theories are empirically questioned. It is shown that the presence of de(result) is not obligatory when the result predicate takes some special forms. A procedural account is proposed of how the typical V de(result) construction and its variants deliver the same logical form although they involve different functional morphemes. As a bonus, this account provides an improved model explaining the phenomenon that the V de(result) construction can have multiple readings.