Abstract:

This paper aims at the problem of continuum and compactness of the formal aspect of causative construction in contemporary Chinese. First, subcategories of the causative construction are discussed, and it is shown that there are abundant lexical and analytic causatives in contemporary Chinese owing to a lack of morphological causatives. Then, different points of view on the compactness are introduced. Both formal distance and productivity can be taken as parameters of the compactness of the formal aspect of causatives. In this way the scale of formal compactness of causatives in Chinese is determined, which works as a base for a further study on the problem of the iconicity between syntactic and semantic compactness.

Key words: continuum, compactness, formal distance, productivity