Is ‘Object-before-complement’ the Only Acceptable Order in Chinese? With a Comment on the Relationship Between Lexicon and Syntax

According to Tang (2010), in Chinese, when object and complement appear at the same time, the only acceptable order is ‘verb-object-complement’, which is not consistent with the view of traditional grammar. Based on the evidences of syntactic transformations, this article points out that the verb-complement forms before objects are actually nothing but phrases. Furthermore, this paper suggestes that the lexicalist view of simplifying syntactic rules and expanding lexicon in contemporary go beyond the limit, which lead to the over-strong generative capability of lexicon. On one hand, this is not consistent with the facts of biolinguistics, and on the other hand, one cannot adequately describe the grammar of a specific language using this framework. Therefore, while simplifying the rules of syntactic operation, we should limit the generative capability of lexicon at the same time.