A Corpus-based Study Of The AcI-constructions At Verbs Of Perception In German

The AcI-construction(accusative and infinitive)is a special infinitive construction without zu in German and mainly appears after causative verb lassen and verbs of perception sehen,h(?)ren,fühlen and spüren.They are semantically different.In this thesis AcI-construction with verbs of perception is the study object.AcI is a demanding object and has been studied by many linguists,but it’s difficult to reach a conclusion.Syntactically,mainstream believes that AcI has sentence value,affirms its clause form in DS,and uses the Government-Binding theory to solve the exceptional case marking of accusative;but others question its sentence value and propose that the infinitive in AcI is a secondary predicate or infinitive and matrix verb form a complex predicate,and try to prove the coherence of AcI.Semantically,generally believed that the AcI with verbs of perception only appears in physical perceptional scenes,and the matrix subject is human,and there are three widely recognized semantic restrictions for the infinitive,simultaneity,process,and no passive.The syntactic controversy is,whether AcI has sentence value or coherence.This thesis is based on the Generative Grammatik and theta theory,and the topological constituent tests as well as semantic features are used to test the coherence and the realization mechanism of AcI.Although the Government-Binding theory can solve the exceptional case marking,it’s difficult to explain topological characteristics of AcI,which is significant to prove the coherence of AcI.But topological constituent tests are also certain subjectivity.Some sentences are idealized constructed,and their effectiveness is doubtful.The corpus used to support the semantic restrictions is also insufficient.Therefore,this thesis expands the corpus and in view of frequency of AcI,the literary corpus from De Re Ko is selected and 3581 natural corpora with context are analyzed.The syntactical conclusions are as follow,the accusative or the complex predicate can be in front field.The negation can only occur once and in any position,but it has a wide scope.The substitute form of AcI-verbs and the displacement of auxiliaries appear optionally in the perfect tense.In summary,the AcI has coherence rather than sentence value,the logical form of AcI doesn’t appear as a CP/SC.Therefore,the AcI-verbs cannot be used as bivalent verbs to bring up AcI with sentence value.The optionality of substitute form and displacement reflects the auxiliary verbalization of AcI-verbs and the possibility of complex predicate is relatively small.In comparison,AcI-verbs are more adequate to be trivalent,the accusative and the infinitive act as arguments in the surface structure.The accusative can be topicalized and act as external argument and subject of the infinitive in the predicate structure,the infinitive as a secondary predicate cannot be topicalized because of the dependence on the accusative.Semantically,AcI appear in both physical and cognitive perception,and the limitation of simultaneity only applies in physical perception.The matrix verb isn’t limited to humans,both living and unliving objects can appear under certain semantic features.The infinitive express process,exceptionally the position state verbs.Compared to dass and wie-complements,[-passive],[-modal verb] and [-auxiliary] are features of AcI.The corresponding structure “S+VP1+NP+VP2” in verbs of perception in Chinese is analyzed.By judging the position of the aspect markers,in view of temporal onedimensionality and through contrastive analysis with bifunctional constituent construction,VP2 can be non-finite,“NP+VP2” is clause object and expresses event,which indicates similarities with AcI-construction with verbs of perception in German.In this thesis,the introduction of real corpus with context as empirical evidence reduces the degree of subjectivity,the coherence of AcI is proven and AcI-verbs act as trivalent verbs.The semantical realization mechanism of verbs of perceptions with AcI are optimized by expanding the corpus.The corresponding structures with verbs of perception in German and Chinese are discussed,which is helpful for Da F-learners.