抱有 vs 摆有: When does a serial verb become a word?

Question

Observation:

保有财产; 抱有好感; 怀有敌意; 他俩育有一子; 学校设有音乐课; 杯子留有指纹

Bi-syllabic verbal compounds like those in bold above are sometimes treated as words (insofar as I found them all listed as "entries/lemmas" in at least one dictionary). When they do, they are presented as forming a lexical unit.

However,

桌上摆有一卷书; 屋中堆有一百袋大米; 庭中种有几棵树; 车上坐有四人; 桌上放有信件; 床下藏有黄金; 林里搭有帐篷; 城内通有地铁; 东北流有福溪; 这片苹果树中杂有几棵梨树。

Bi-syllabic verbal change compounds like these are not recorded in any dictionary, although they are similarly-formed and otherwise unexceptional. When pressed, people simply describe them as serial verb constructions.

Problem:

Chinese grammars describe many types of serial verb constructions, but NEVER in the V+有 pattern. Chinese dictionaries rarely if ever list any of the above V+有 compounds as words, as observed above. So how are we to analyse these compounds?

Morphologically, they do seem perfectly good candidates for word-hood but, syntactically, they could also be described as resultative constructions of one form or another.

Questions:

1. Do you think they are all simply collocations of verbs arranged in a resultative (or other?) construction?

2. If not (and so you think some of them are words), are there any criteria we can use to explain why some are to be excluded from word-hood?

3. If you're a Chinese native speaker, do compounds like 摆有, 堆有, 种有, 坐有, 杂有 (which never appear in dictionaries) strike you as creative constructions?

   • If so: Would you compose them each time afresh, based on context? (For example, thinking of 庭+有树 and deciding to add in 种 to clarify how the tree are in the courtyard or thinking about 车+有人 and deciding to add in 坐 to clarify how the people are in the car)?
   • If not: Does it surprise you that some dictionaries list compounds like 持有, 保有, 抱有 and 育有 but no dictionary lists compounds like 摆有, 坐有, 种有 and 堆有? How would you explain this fact?

Answer 1

Most of the examples listed are based on a special function of the verb 有 (possess) to follow and bond with another verb to form a tightly-bound term. In linguistic terms, it is called a serial verb compound.

Some serial verb compounds like 抱有(e.g 抱有大志)，擁有(e.g. 擁有巨大財富) and 藏有(e.g. 藏有毒品) became compound words because they are very commonly used and people treat them as such.

Since 有 can bond with so many verbs, it is simpler to group all these possible serial verb compounds under the function of 有 than list each and every possible pair as an independent compound word

Similarly. Not all [verb + result complement] is listed as an independent compound word, but the common ones do

Example:

走避; 走失 (compound words)

走掉, 走上，走入，走出 (verb + result complement)

We do not list 走掉, 走上，走入，走出 as compound words, they are all under 走's ability to bond with a result complement

Typically, a compound words is coined with two related/ similar meaning characters

Answer 2

Edit: The original answer was toward a previous version of the question which claimed 保有, 抱有, etc. are counted in all dictionaries of standard Chinese.

As others have pointed out, because Chinese doesn't have inherent word boundaries, the concept of word is fuzzy and there are many borderline cases of what counts as word and what counts as phrases with substructures.

From a practical viewpoint, the reason that a dictionary selects an entry is that 1) it is likely to be encountered by the intended users of the dictionary; 2) the said user probably will have difficulty understanding that entry.

Hence 保有 is collected in a number of dictionaries for native speakers, because 保有 means to own or keep something, but standalone 保 (to protect) does not have this meaning in modern Chinese, hence the meaning of 保有 cannot be directly derived from the meaning of 保.

Without knowning exactly which dictionary collects these words I cannot comment on why. I would guess the editors of that dictionary thought those constructions would confuse language learners as some of them have slightly derived meanings. Example: 抱 means to hug something (physically), but 抱有 is often used in the derived meaning of keeping some kind of feeling in heart as in 抱有幻想. On the other hand they thought 摆有 and others were transparent enough and need no explanation.

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Original answer: Which dictionaries?

	保有	抱有	怀有	育有	设有	留有
新华字典 第12版	N	N	N	N	N	N
现代汉语词典 第7版	Y	N	N	N	N	N
现代汉语规范词典 第4版	Y	N	Y	N	N	N
现代汉语大词典	N	N	N	N	N	N
（Taiwan) 重編國語辭典修訂本	Y	N	only in phrase 怀有鬼胎	N	N	only in phrase 留有余地
(HK) 漢語多功能字庫	N	N	N	N	N	N

The dictionaries listed here include the most commonly used Chinese-Chinese dictionaries in mainland China. Only 保有 and 怀有 are present in at least one dictionary. It is definitely not the case that "they are counted in all dictionaries." Note that I only consider dictionaries that are academically reliable.