compound:vo: verb-object compound
The compound:vo relation is used for verb-object compounds where the combination is semantically one unit but syntactically separate. These are known as 離合詞 lei4hap6ci4 “separable words” in Chinese linguistics.
These compounds run the range of:
- (i) light verb constructions where the noun carries more semantic weight than the verb
- e.g., 打␣電話 / daa2-din6waa2 hit-telephone “make a phone call”
- (equivalents of these in other languages may be labeled with
compound:lvc)
- (ii) neither the verb or noun can be considered the semantic head (i.e., an exocentric compound)
- e.g., 讀␣書 / duk6-syu1 read-book “study”
- (iii) situations where the verb carries the semantic weight over a relatively empty noun or the noun is semantically redundant
- e.g., 瞓␣覺 / fan3-gaau3 sleep(verb)-sleep(noun) “sleep”
- in the example, the noun 覺 no longer has a modern lexical usage independently and the verb 睡 can be used on its own to convey the same meaning
All of the above cases have the same syntactic distribution, where the object behaves like a direct object of the verb. Verb-object compounds never take another object as direct object, and the object can be separated from the verb as in regular non-compound situations.
For example, aspect markers as well as adverbials of duration and frequency, when present, come in between:
When undergoing verb-verb compounding (see compound:vv), it is the verb in the verb-object compound that undergoes the compounding, rather than the entire verb-object unit, resulting in a VVO order instead of a VOV order:
Additionally, the object in a verb-object compound may be modified (by an adjective or possessive), and also fronted to topic position (in which case the object is linked to the verb as a dislocated:vo dependent):
Note that when both the verb and the object are monosyllabic and they are adjacent without intervening material, they are treated as a single word in the tokenization/word segmentation stage.
compound:vo in other languages: [yue] [zh]