Due to the analogy of the combinatorial power of these newly acquired devices of the grammar, the structure of the predicate in Contemporary Chinese is grammatically required to be bounded by some means; otherwise, the sentence may be ill-formed. In Contemporary Chinese, specifically, a sentence sounds incomplete unless aspect markers, time words, quantifiers, preposition phrases, or resultatives are added. From Middle Chinese to the present day, the Chinese language has acquired many grammatical constructions and markings, including mainly the resultative construction, the aspect system, verb reduplication, and verb classifiers. All of these grammatical apparatuses have something in common: they are suffixed with the matrix verb to constitute an immediate constituent. As a consequence, they all function to make the matrix verb bounded in some sense.

This chapter demonstrates that because of the fusion of the verb and the resultative via reanalysis, the syntactic position for a patient noun between them was eliminated so that the originally intervening patient noun needed to be rearranged somewhere in the sentence on the basis of the following principle: the patient noun was introduced in preverbal position by the disposal marker if it was definite, and was introduced by the first verb of the verb-copying construction if it was indefinite. This issue is related to the motivations for the emergence of the verb-copying construction and the unmarked SOV structure, all of which were entirely innovative in Modern Chinese.

This chapter discusses the diachronic sources and the synchronic properties of the resultative construction from various angles, including a brief cross-linguistic comparison of similar phenomena; an investigation of the semantic, syntactic, and phonological properties of the resultative construction; and a consideration of its obligatory application in certain syntactic constructions.