The Co-occurrence of Two Delimiters: An Investigation of Mandarin Chinese Resultatives

Tenny (1987, 1994: 79) proposes the Single Delimiting Constraint that the event described by a verb can only be delimited once (cf. Goldberg 1991, 1995). The constraint applies the effects of delimitedness as an aspectual property to the mapping of semantics and syntax, and explains why sentences with two delimiters (e.g., *Martha wiped the table dry1 clean2 Tenny 1994: 80) are unacceptable. The constraint is challenged with English counterexamples and modified by Matsumoto (2006) and Zhou (2008). However, this study proposes that the constraint holds for Mandarin Chinese resultatives, whereas the revised constraints do not. Furthermore, we point out that while two independent delimiters usually do not co-occur in Chinese, a second delimiter that further specifies or reinforces the endpoint/ endstate denoted by the first delimiter is allowed (cf. Tenny 1994, Goldberg 1991). The results of this study may shed light on event structure of Chinese.