A Comparative Analysis Of Causative Sentences In English And Chinese

The causative sentence is a main sentence pattern in a language. It means " someone or something brings about or causes an action or state". The English and Chinese language are of different language typology, but languages contain periphrastic and lexical causative sentences. On comparing periphrastic causative sentences in English and Chinese, this paper finds that the external theta role is "cause". Further more it was found that causative meanings become stronger by degree in both languages. English and Chinese have syntactic structures like NP1+V1+NP2+V2, NP1+V+NP2+PP, NP1+V+NP2+ADJ. This paper uses GB theory to analyze the generation of surface structures. As for the lexical causative sentence, this paper uses Vendler's method for classifying all types of English verbs. It also uses some logical forms to express such verbs, which shows that adjective lexical causative sentences are much more common than verbal lexical causative ones, even though only verbal lexical causatives exist in English.