The Syntax of V-V Resultatives in Mandarin Chinese

The Syntax of V-V Resultatives in Mandarin Chinese
Author: Jianxun Liu
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2019
Genre:
ISBN:

This is a study on the syntax of V-V resultative constructions in Mandarin Chinese within the generative framework. I investigate three aspects of these constructions: the generation of resultative V-V compounds, the syntactic structure of V-V resultatives, and their alternation properties. First, I investigate in which component of grammar and with what mechanisms resultative V-V compounds are generated. With regard to the generation of complex words, Marantz (2000) proposes that words are generated in two different syntactic domains, the inner domain of a lexical root and the outer domain, and words thus generated demonstrate different properties. Adopting this proposal, I propose a syntactic analysis of the generation of resultative V-V compounds. One observation of this study is that V-V resultative compounds and another type of V-V compounds in Mandarin Chinese, parallel V-V compounds, while seemingly similar, possess systematically different properties. Based on this observation, I argue that resultative V-V compounds are formed in the outer domain, by combining two categorized verbs (vP1 and vP2), while parallel V-V compounds are formed in the inner domain, in which the two acategorical lexical roots (√1 and √2) combine first to form a root complex, which then merges with little v. Second, I explore an event-mapping approach to the syntactic structure of V-V resultatives. Regarding the syntactic representation of the semantic event structures, the isomorphism hypothesis (e.g., Lin, 2004; Ramchand, 2008) postulates that there is a transparent correspondence between semantic subevents and the syntactic element of vPs. Particularly, Lin's (2004) isomorphism analysis argues that two types of V-V resultative constructions, object-oriented and subject-oriented V-V resultatives, have the same event structure, and therefore have the same syntactic structure, in which three vPs represent three subevents. In the present study, based on the adverbial modification properties, I argue that an isomorphism analysis of Mandarin V-V resultatives does not hold, and that the two types of V-V resultatives have different syntactic structures. To be more specific, while the syntactic structure of object-oriented V-V resultatives contains two vPs, a vCAUSEP that takes as its complement a vBECOMEP, the syntactic structure of subject-oriented V-V resultatives contains a single vBECOMEP. This analysis reveals that, while object-oriented V-V resultatives are causative constructions, subject-oriented V-V resultatives are inchoative unaccusative predicates, despite the 'cause-result' meaning they convey. Finally, based on the analysis that object-oriented and subject-oriented V-V resultatives have different syntactic structures, I account for their alternation properties. I propose that the alternative uses of these two types of V-V resultatives fall into two different categorizations: decausativization (of object-oriented resultatives) and causativization (of subject-oriented resultatives). I then argue that (most of) the properties of the alternative uses of V-V resultatives have two sources: the distinctive semantic and syntactic properties of subject-oriented resultatives, and the Direct Causation Condition on the subject in causatives.

Chinese Lexical Semantics

Chinese Lexical Semantics
Author: Minghui Dong
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 785
Release: 2016-11-23
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3319495089

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 17th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2016, held in Singapore, Singapore, in May 2016. The 70 regular papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 182 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: lexicon and morphology, the syntax-semantics interface, corpus and resource, natural language processing, case study of lexical semantics, extended study and application.

The Establishment of Modern Chinese Grammar

The Establishment of Modern Chinese Grammar
Author: Yuzhi Shi
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2002-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789027230621

This book investigates historical motivations for the emergence of the resultative construction in Chinese from the following four aspects: (a) disyllabification, (b)adjacent context, (c) semantic integrity, and (d) frequency of co-occurence of a pair of verb and resultative. The author also addresses a series of grammatical changes and innovations caused by the formation of this resultative construction, such as the development of aspect, mood, verb reduplication, the new predicate structure, the disposal construction, the passive construction, the verb copying construction, and the new topicalization construction, all of which together shape the grammatical system of Modern Chinese. The present analysis raises and discusses a number of theoretical issues that are meaningful to various linguistic disciplines like pragmatics, discourse analysis, grammaticalization, and general historical linguistics.

The Syntax of V-V Resultatives in Mandarin Chinese

The Syntax of V-V Resultatives in Mandarin Chinese
Author: Jianxun Liu
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2021-03-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9813368462

This book addresses the three fundamental properties of V-V resultative constructions in Mandarin Chinese: their generation, their syntactic structure, and their alternations. This book is original and new in the following aspects. First, adopting the ‘inner vs. outer domain’ theory, it provides new analysis and evidence that these compounds are generated in syntax, not in lexicon. Second, this book argues that the two subclasses of V-V resultative constructions, object-oriented vs. subject-oriented V-V resultatives, actually have different structures. Their syntactic contrasts have not been observed in the literature before. Third, this book is new in determining the syntactic structure of the V-V resultative constructions through their adverbial modification properties. It demonstrates that the previous isomorphism analysis of the syntactic structure of Chinese V-V resultatives does not hold. Finally, this book provides a new analysis of the issue of the alternations of V-V resultatives. In contrast to previous analyses, which generally view the causative alternation as the idiosyncratic property of particular V-V compounds, this book provides a principled analysis. This book makes a substantial improvement of the current understanding of the issues in the syntax of Mandarin Chinese and gives new support to certain theories of the generative grammar from the perspective of Mandarin Chinese.

Chinese Lexical Semantics

Chinese Lexical Semantics
Author: Jia-Fei Hong
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 828
Release: 2018-11-25
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3030040151

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 19th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2018, held in Chiayi, Taiwan, in May 2018. The 50 full papers and 19 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 150 submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: Lexical Semantics; Applications of Natural Language Processing; Lexical Resources; Corpus Linguistics.