A Study On The Syntactic Peculiarities Of ’Chi(Eat)’ Under The Framework Of Generative Constructivism

It is generally acknowledged that there are a lot of differences between English and Mandarin in terms of argument realization.A noticeable one is that the types of arguments following Mandarin verbs are much more diverse than those following English verbs.The complexity in the argument realization of Mandarin verbs can be best illustrated by the action verb‘吃’,which has drawn much attention from scholars in various fields.Abundant studies on the syntactic behaviors of‘吃’have been carried out under different theoretical frameworks.However,the explanatory adequacy of these studies has come under debate,and cannot be extended to explain other complex argument realization of verbs.In addition,most of the existing studies have adopted the same examples from the previous ones and few scholars have made attempts to collect and analyze the synchronic data in authentic contexts and give an overall description of its argument realization by comparing‘吃’with‘eat’.Given this situation,the primary aim of this thesis is to introduce a more adequate explanation of the argument realization of‘吃’,which can also be adopted to account for the syntactic peculiarities of other verbs both in Mandarin and English based on empirical data.In this thesis,we adopt the framework of Generative Constructivism to give an in-depth analysis on the syntactic peculiarities of‘吃’,by elaborating the idiosyncratic meanings of verb roots and event functional categories.Methodologically,a thorough empirical research will be conducted on the complexity of argument realization of‘吃’and‘eat’by collecting and analyzing the up-to-date linguistic data in corpora,BCC and COCA,respectively.On the basis of the collected data,empirical evidence is provided to prove the standpoint that the argument realization of the Chinese verb‘吃’is much more complex than that of its English counterpart‘eat’.Specifically,the types of non-canonical objects of‘吃’are more abundant than that following‘eat’,and the portion of non-canonical objects of‘吃’is drastically higher.Also,there exists a unique construction of‘吃+NP2+NP3’in Mandarin,which is missing in English.More importantly,taking the explanatory adequacy as the major goal,this thesis will discuss the generative mechanism of those special constructions of‘吃’from a new theoretical perspective.Specifically,this thesis aims to explain the syntactic peculiarities of the non-canonical objects of‘吃’and the construction of‘吃+NP2+NP3’under the framework of Generative Constructivism.According to our analysis,the non-canonical objects of‘吃’are licensed not by functional categories as assumed by many previous studies,but by the verbal root√吃,which can select different types of light verbs in its projection on the basis of event conceptualization,and finally form independent lexical items with different realization methods.With regard to the atypical double object construction of‘吃+NP2+NP3’,we classify them into two types according to referential properties of the objects immediately following‘吃’,i.e.NP2.If NP2 has specific reference,we assume that NP2 and NP3 are both introduced into syntax by event functional category v _Lose.On the other hand,if NP2 is a non-specific element,we postulate that it is an element which plays no role in syntactic derivation but is inserted post-syntactically when the derivation is transferred to the PF branch.In a word,this thesis provides a new perspective from Generative Constructivism to elaborate on the generative mechanism of non-canonical objects of‘吃’.It has exuded both theoretical and empirical significance on the argument realization of‘吃’,and it is our belief that the findings this thesis has made can be extended to other complicated phenomena in Mandarin.