A Corpus-based Study On Semantic-syntactic Interfaces Of English And Chinese Instantaneous And Non-instantaneous COS Verbs

COS verbs refer to the verbs which describe the entity that undergoes a change of state in appearance or shape and so on,which have received much attention from linguists in recent years.The previous studies on COS verbs are mainly theoretical illustrations from syntactic approach or lexical approach and lack the support of real material.The contrastive studies on COS verbs between two different languages are relatively small in quantity.This study based on event structure theory(Levin&Rappaport 1998)makes a contrastive study of semantic-syntactic interfaces on English and Chinese instantaneous and non-instantaneous COS verbs.In the study,the natural tokens are retrieved in COCA and CCL to find the differences and similarities of causative alternation and resultative construction on English and Chinese COS verbs and corresponding explanations on semantic-syntactic interface are put forward.Moreover,it also aims to point out whether the aspect property "instantaneity" influences the syntactic behavior of English and Chinese COS verbs.With regard to the purpose,the study proposes three major research questions:(1)What are the similarities and differences between English and Chinese instantaneous and non-instantaneous COS verbs in their syntactic behaviour?(2)Does the aspect property "instantaneity" have influence on syntactic behavior of English and Chinese COS verbs?(3)What are the similarities and differences between English and Chinese instantaneous and non-instantaneous COS verbs in their semantic-syntactic interfaces?From the perspective of event structure theory,the study takes a corpus-based approach and combines the quantitative and qualitative analyses.Firstly,by reference to six types of English COS verbs divided by Levin(1993),nine common English COS verbs are selected and divided into two groups according to the aspect property"instananeity".Then their counterparts in Chinese are ascertained respectively.Next,the data is collected from COCA and CCL online by KWIC method.After that,the author compares the syntactic behaviour of English and Chinese COS verbs in terms of causative alternation and resultative construction.By analyzing the syntactic behaviour of English and Chinese COS verbs in the corpora,the study has three major findings.First,English COS verbs are all ergative verbs which can participate in causative alternation and resultative construction while for Chinese COS verbs,most of them are ergative verbs which can participate in causative alternation but resultative construction seldom occurs in Chinese COS verbs.Second,the frequency of occurrences of resultative construction in non-instantaneous COS verbs is lower than instantaneous COS verbs in English.Third,there are similarities and differences existing in the mapping from semantic features to syntax between English and Chinese COS verbs.For English COS verbs,three semantic features of action,causativity and state of result are lexicalized in one verb,which does not apply to most Chinese COS verbs.Furthermore,Chinese COS verbs can be used in "把" structure and "使" structure,preferences for which are determined by different degree of volition of verbs.And the degree of volition is mainly determined by the root meanings of Chinese COS verbs.The study broadens the research perspective for the contrastive study of English and Chinese COS verbs.Its results may have some implications for the translation of instantaneous and non-instantaneous COS verbs between English and Chinese.This thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter One introduces briefly the research background of the study,the objectives and necessity of the study and the organization of the thesis.The second chapter is the literature review which summarizes previous studies of event structure-and COS verbs both at home and abroad and then puts forward the originality of the study.In Chapter Three the theoretical framework of the study is introduced,which involves generalized semantic roles,the three conceptualizations of event and Levin’s event structure theory.Chapter Four is research design including research questions,data collection and the procedures for analysis.Chapter Five explains the results and discussions in detail.The last chapter makes a conclusion about the findings of the study and the implications and limitations of the study are put forward in the end.