This study investigates the inverted quantitative causative construction in Modern Chinese based on a corpus-driven analysis. By examining 788 authentic corpus examples, the paper analyzes how the core components of the construction—cause XP, predicate with le(了), object NP, and resultative quantitative phrase (QP)—interact to form a single accomplishment event. The sentence-initial cause functions as a topic denoting an event proposition and may surface as NP, VP, or S depending on the speaker’s attentional focus. The predicate is constrained by its ability to undergo causative alternation, while the post-verbal marker le(了) establishes an endpoint that enables a completive interpretation. The object NP represents the experiencer of the state change and is informationally backgrounded, frequently realized as a first-person pronoun or omitted in discourse. The QP serves as the focal element of the sentence, quantitatively measuring the result of the change, with temporal QPs forming the prototypical category. The findings demonstrate that this construction integrates event structure, aspectual interpretation, and information structure in a systematic manner. This study thus provides empirical support for a usage-based account of quantitative causative constructions in Chinese.
Kim et al. (Sat,) studied this question.