From the Baseline/Elaboration Perspective to Unveil the Syntactic Alignment of the “VOVdeX” Construction in Mandarin

This study investigates how two baselines “VO” and “VdeX” in the “VOVdeX” construction are connected at the syntactic level to form a complete event. Based on 2,390 linguistic samples of the “VOVdeX” construction collected from the Beijing Language University Corpus Centre, the Centre for Chinese Linguistics at Peking University, and previous research, this paper discovers three major categories of the “VOVdeX” construction: the descriptive, commentary and causative “VOVdeX” construction. Syntactic features of the “VOVdeX” construction and the semantic inheritance between the “VO” and “VdeX” are discussed. The “VOVdeX” construction has three variables, “V”, “O”, and “X”, and a constant, “de”. The verb “V” profiles a schematic trajector and a schematic landmark; the object “O” profiles a semantic substructure, and elaborates on the schematic substructure profiled by the verb “V” in the component “VO”; the complement “X” also profiles a semantic substructure, and elaborates on the schematic substructure profiled by the verb “V” in the component “VdeX”. The first verb “V” and the object “O” constitute a verb-object structure “VO”, and the second verb “V” and the complement “X” comprise a verb-complement structure “VdeX”. The “VO” and “VdeX” are two baselines according to the baseline/elaboration organization, which are linked through the repetition of the verb “V”.