non-subcategorized complement

[Ren Zhang]

Dear linguists,
In Chinese, there is  a well-known type of construction in which a verb
is followed by a non-subcategorized complement noun or noun phrase:
1. xie   zhe-zhi bi
   write this     pen
  "write with this pen"
2. chi shi-tang
    eat dining-hall
   "go to a dining-hall for a meal"
3. xie  hei-ban
   write blackboard
  "write on the blackboard"
4 xi  liang shui
  clean cool water
 "shower with cool water"
It seems there has been no aggreement as to how constructions like these
should be analyzed in Chinese linguistics. My general impression is that
the non-subcategorized complement somehow modifies the action expressed
by the verb in terms of manner. It also conveys new information, as has
been pointed out by some researchers.
I am interested in similar phenomena, if any,  in other languages and
would like to get pointers as to any literature dealing with the issue, from any perspective. While I am aware of a few Chomskyian style syntactic analyses of such constructions, those that adopt a semantic/functional/cognitive perspective to argument structure would be particularly useful to me. 
If there is enough interest, I would post a summary to the list. 
Thanks a lot!

Ren Zhang
York University
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