In essence, argument structure (“a-structure” henceforth) is the traditional notion of transitivity reconceptualized in and enriched by modern linguistic theory. The a-structure of a lexical predicator describes its semantic and syntactic abilities to combine with other core constituents in a sentence. Usually, though not always, the focus of a-structure research is on verbal predicators. In this respect, Chinese has offered valuable contributions to our understanding of a-structure.

A situation S, be it a state or an event, has a number of participants each of…