A Contrastive Study On Semantic Features Of Causative Verbs In English And Chinese

Causation concept is one of the basic concepts in human languages and the causative verbs (CV) are the most important way of expressing causation concepts. The definition of causative verbs is that the causer makes causee perform an action or undergo a change of state through the various types of force. It is fundamentally the same in both English and Chinese. In addition, the core semantic feature of causative verbs is [+CAUSE]. Taking the various types of force into consideration, this paper selected the speech force type of CV as the target. Based on the methods of contrastive linguistics and semantics, this paper contrastively analyze the semantic features of causative verbs, including four English CV "ask, order, command, persuade" and six Chinese CV“请求,要求,命令,吩咐,说服,劝说”,and their internal and external argument, and explore the semantic co-occurrence relationship between them in sentences.By using the componential analysis and the method of contrastive linguistics, this paper extracts the core semantic features of English and Chinese CV, including the general semantic features:[+CAUSE],[EVENT],[+SINGLE-TRACK] and the distinctive semantic features:[+SUBJECT/-SUBJECT] and [+F0RCE/-FORCE]. Then, this paper analyzes the semantic features of the internal and external argument of CV on the basis of the result above and draw a conclusion that the semantic features of external argument of CV include not only [+HUMAN], but [+GROUP],[+ORGANIZATION] etc; moreover, the semantic features of internal argument of CV might be [+SUBJECT INTENTION],[+SUBJECT BENEFIT]. At last, this paper finds out that the semantic features of internal argument of English and Chinese CV, to a large extent, is greatly influenced by the semantic features of the CV. In addition, when the internal and external argument coexists in a sentence, the semantic features of the each component should be similar or related.Based on the existing research results, this paper aims to find out the semantic features of English and Chinese causative verbs and explore the semantic co-occurrence relationship between the CV and their internal and external argument by applying the method of language contrast and componential analysis.This paper may offer some valuable guidance to the researches about other types of verbs and does positive impact on both teaching and learning of English and Chinese causative verbs.