ABSTRACT
Chapter four discussed in detail the ongoing syntactic change taking place in shi-de structures when a sentence-final de re-positions itself between the verb and its object. In the course of the chapter it was mentioned that such repositioning of an element from a sentence-fmal position to one right-adjacent o the verb in fact has a clear historical precedent in Mandarin Chinese and that the element Ze/liao is known to have undergone a similar change in position. This surface parallelism in the re-positioning of de and Ie discussed in chapter four is schematized below in (1):
(1) a. V Object de ~ V-de Object b. V Object liao ~ V-liaolle Object
The present chapter focuses on a third potential instantiation of the same patterning diachronically found in the creation of resultative constructions such as Modern Chinese (2) and (3) below:
(2) ta xi-ganjing yifu Ie. he wash clean clothes LE 'He washed the clothes clean. '
