As a monograph on causative VO compounds (such as 健身, 美容, 喜人, and 醉心) whose surface structure and deep structure differ, this book studies the subject from the syntactic, morphological and semantic aspects, with construction grammar as its theoretical foundation. Based on a review of how the construction of modern Chinese causative VO compounds has been formed, this book gives a detailed analysis of three types of causative VO compounds in terms of their constructional meaning, syntactic transformation, semantic characteristics, semantic relations, and the unsymmetrical correspondence between the constructional meaning and the constituent meaning. It discusses the influence of causative VO compounds on the constituents’ semantic development and functional evolution and the formation and expansion of the set of compound words from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives, and analyzes the syntactic and semantic factors that contribute to the prototypical/peripheral status of causative VO compounds. A comparison with other morphological models that have vacancy within verifies the necessity and linguistic significance of establishing the construction of causative VO compounds, and a questionnaire test carried out among L2 Chinese learners shows that the relation between the form and meaning of compound words should be given more attention to in Chinese vocabulary teaching. 

Ms. Meng Kai is a BLCU associate professor, an editor of Chinese Teaching in the World (journal), and a postgraduate supervisor whose major research interests include modern Chinese lexical semantics and CFL teaching. Ms. Meng has published more than 20 academic papers in a number of linguistic journals and has hosted or participated in several projects at the state level, city level and university level. Meng is also the chief editor of the Japanese version of the series of dictionaries on the discrimination of confusable Chinese words and a co-editor of New Practical Chinese Reader (3rd Edition).