Unaccusative Syntactic Configurations At The Syntax And Semantics Interface

This dissertation presents a contrastive study on unaccusativity in the generative framework, holding that the traditional intransitives in Chinese should also be classified as unergatives and unaccusatives. It is not intended to offer an explicit word list of unaccusative verbs, but rather focuses on the relational construal of the syntactic configuration of the unaccusative constructions.Following Hale and Keyser (1993f), this dissertation argues that the traditional V-O compounds like chuhan'sweat', liuxue'bleed', shengqi'be enraged', shanguang'glitter', chusheng'make a sound', etc. in Chinese, which are unergative in nature, all have undergone a lexical-syntactic operation, before they enter the sentential-syntactic operation and turn out to be unaccusativized.The typical intransitive verbs in Chinese like lai'come', si'die', and xiao'laugh', etc. all can be represented in the configuration with an immediate postverbal NP or with a secondary predicate to license a postverbal NP. These are argued to be representations of unaccusativity in the configurations of existential construction (EC) and resultative construction (RC).It is the same case with Chinese that unaccusative verbs can not be identified only based on the semantic features. It is argued that the unaccusativity in Chinese can be predicted in terms of the syntactic configurations and functional projections. Namely, unaccusativity is primarily determined by syntactic positions rather than semantic features. Of the two syntactic representations, the existential and resultative constructions, not all the verbs compatible with the constructions are unaccusatives. ECs are not the diagnostics of unaccusativity, while RC in the DOR (direct object restriction) sense is. The location or the possessive subject, as the external argument, in the ECs in Chinese is licensed by Applicativization, while there-insertion in English is not. This parametrical difference lies in the presence or absence of the Applicative phrase Projection.In addition to the nonsubcategrized verbs taking a postverbal NP, there are various so called topicalization structures, of which one is derived by fronting of the transitive object, like ji chiwan le'The chicken is eaten up'. This is also argued to be a representation of resultative unaccusativity by lexical passivization. With respect to RCs, the typical representation is derived from a core structure in Figure-Ground configuration adjoined by an activity event realized by a transitive or an unergative verb, rather than in the way of event augmentation. The causative relation between the two events is licensed by the functional head Voice.The main claims in this dissertation is as follows:(i) Unaccusativity is very productive in Chinese, which is not labeled in the lexicon, but rather derived via lexical-syntactic and sentential-syntactic configurations, especially in the form of the core structure represented by the achievements and accomplishments.(ii) A good many unergative verbs in Chinese are represented in syntactic configuration at the lexical level, by means of a lexical-syntactic operation.(iii) Not all verbs compatible with the ECs are unaccusative. The location NP in the subject position in ECs is licensed by Applicativization. ECs are not diagnostics.(iv) RC is the diagnostic in accordance with DOR. The traditional RCs should be classified as RC and depictive predicate construction.(v) Topicalization in the change of state sense can be grouped as a non-typical unaccusative representation.This dissertation explores and gives an account for the unaccusative syntactic representations on the syntactic configuration approach, which just provide a different perspective to the complicated linguistic issues suggestively rather than prescriptively. Many suggestions related are still open for further study in the hope that it will be carried on for the linguistic theoretical development and teaching of Chinese to foreigners.