This opens a nice can of worms: How freely combinable does a morpheme have to be before it can be considered a syntactic marker? Compared to a prototypical aspect marker like 了, the use of 完 is quite restricted. Offhand, the only other similar usages I can think of are 喝完 "drink up", 用完 "use up", and 做完 "finish [work], do to completion".
The literature treats forms such as 做完, 找到 "find" ["look for" + "arrive"], 造成 "compose; result in" ["make" + "achieve"] as "resultative verb compounds". Although there are a limited number of second elements, (a) it's not small; (b) the selection is lexically determined (i.e. *找完, *喝到, *用成) and (c) the interpretations are often idiomatic (e.g. 觀掉 "close" + "drop" = "turn off"). There are a lot of parallels to English verb-particle phrases.
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2006-01-24 03:29 pm (UTC)The literature treats forms such as 做完, 找到 "find" ["look for" + "arrive"], 造成 "compose; result in" ["make" + "achieve"] as "resultative verb compounds". Although there are a limited number of second elements, (a) it's not small; (b) the selection is lexically determined (i.e. *找完, *喝到, *用成) and (c) the interpretations are often idiomatic (e.g. 觀掉 "close" + "drop" = "turn off"). There are a lot of parallels to English verb-particle phrases.