Abstract
This thesis starts with the discussion on the definition of phase complements in Mandarin Chinese. The phase complement serves as the complement of the first verb in Resultative Verb Compound in Mandarin Chinese. Previous studies show that the function of the phase complement is to denote the stage of an action in the first verb. The phase complement does not carry a concrete meaning (Chao 1968). It only provides telicity information to an action (Smith 1991). Thus, it affects the aspectual properties of a sentence. Liao (2004) provides the three-layers aspectual structure to account for the different layers of aspects. He claims that the phase complement is located at the position of the middle aspect. The middle aspect, in Liao’s term, corresponds to the inner aspect of Travis (2006). In this work, we will discuss the grammatical properties of the phase complement wan ‘finish’, dao and hao ‘complete’. We will examine the complement, the verb and the subject of the V-wan compound, the V-dao compound and the V-hao compound respectively. The result shows that the phase complement wan ‘finish’ encodes two meanings: finish and end. The phase complement dao encodes three meanings: attain, obtain and reach. The phase complement hao encodes two meanings: complete and attentive. At last, we will adopt a light verb approach (Tseng 2014) to analyze the syntactic position of phase complements. We propose that the position of phase complements is located at the pre-verbal light verb position, namely, the inner aspect.