Resultative complements
Finishing the job. My exposure to Chinese grammar came at a rather early age and by indirect means. When I was little, my mother would occasionally use the phrase "go have a look-see". I interpreted "look-see" as a hypcoristic form "looksy" (or "looksie"; the orthographers continue to debate the exact form) because the second verb was unstressed and seemed to be a mere suffix. What I wasn't to learn until some time later when, in the early 1980s, a woman who was to lecture me in English at university was interviewed on TV after she had come back from a brief stint in China teaching English, was that "go have a look-see" was Chinese Pidgin English. I encountered the actual phrase in Chinese in the antiquated version of Teach Yourself Chinese that I acquired in the two or three years after that. This book was clearly set in pre-Revolutionary China where servants would scurry off to do their master's bidding, and I remember the si...