A Study Of Subject-Oriented And Object-Oriented Adverbial Constructions In Chinese And English: Towards A Usage-Based Network Model

This thesis investigates oriented adverbial constructions in Chinese and English.The study of oriented adverbials is significant in that it offers insights into the well-recognized peculiarity of adverbial behaviors as well as the important issue about mapping from syntax to semantics.Besides,a contrastive study between Chinese and English can shed light on distributive differences of the two languages.Although there is abundant research investigating oriented adverbials,several gaps still exist.Analyses pivoted on describing semantic properties are inadequate as those generalized are based on limited data,and are not powerful to sanction novel expressions.Some constructs from cognitive linguistics have been adopted to explain object-oriented adverbial constructions in Chinese,but arguments made are less convincing.Form centered analyses are either problematic or not cross-linguistically applicable.Moreover,the connection between subject-oriented and object-oriented adverbial constructions in Chinese and English has been disregarded,which could have complemented the study.The present thesis studies the oriented adverbial construction as a whole.It is argued that the connection between subject-oriented and object-oriented adverbials in Chinese and English can be organized into a usage-based network model.Three findings have been concluded in this thesis.First,subject-oriented and object-oriented adverbial constructions elaborate a higher abstract schema NP1 A VP NP2(A can also occur after NP2 in English),but subject-oriented adverbial construction is the prototypical instance while object-oriented adverbial construction is the peripheral one.Nonetheless,there is categorization relationship between the two,which is possible due to the perceived similarity between the two.To be specific,the subject-only constraint in subject-oriented adverbial construction stipulates that the focus must be on the subject,and in object-oriented adverbial constructions,all the types investigated have been shown to encode less transitive event types,which naturally give prominence on subject.This further explains the distribution of object-oriented adverbials in Chinese.Second,the network for oriented adverbial constructions in English has also been established.The special syntactic configuration that object-oriented adverbials show up in English suggests the connection.The present research also explicates the constrained productivity by extending the network to include the secondary predication construction which consists of highly entrenched subject-oriented and object-oriented predicative construction in English.The great entrenchment for the object-oriented depictive and resultative constructions overrides the activation of object-oriented adverbial constructions.Hence they are quite rare in English.Third,subject-oriented adverbial constructions in the two languages share similar semantic meanings and syntactic constraints.As for object-oriented adverbial constructions,only verbs of property change show up in English construction.This further shows the lower degree of categorization.It is also argued that the-ly adverbs slightly affects the possible acceptability of object-oriented adverbials since they frequently collocate with words indicating abstract senses.The current study builds a usage-based network model for oriented adverbial constructions in English and Chinese.Practically it has suggested a unified treatment of separately discussed constructions.Theoretically,it used the modified network model to analyze larger linguistic assembly,and suggests its broader applicability.