Agent And Patient: Their Semantic And Pragmatic Status And Their Roles In Chinese Grammatical Constructions

Based on an analytic study of two main grammatical roles: the Agent and the Patient, this dissertation focuses on the semantic-pragmatic status of the agency and the affectedness and their increasing and decreasing mechanisms among grammatical constructions in Contemporary Chinese.The first part of Chapter 1 is a short historical review of Chinese Grammar study involving the properties of the agent and the patient in the past 100 years. The second part of this chapter is a brief discussion of the development of the concepts of the Agent and the Patient, from Fillmore's Case Grammar to Tecent accounts of various linguistic theories, especially Dowty's Proto roles notion: the proto-agent and the proto-patient. Finally, the goal of this dissertation is proposed.Chapter 2 argues that the agent interpretation often arises from its context with pragmatic information, unless an item, which is quite rare in natural language, is encoded pragmatically within its lexical unit. This finding is supported by the evidence from the inherent lexical content of the subject nouns, the lexical semantic natures of so-called 'volitional verbs', and the construction in which the verb and nouns co-exist. Finally, the syntactic hierarchy of the preferred agency slots is given, which is encoded and interpreted by both addressers' empathy and the perspective hierarchy.Chapter 3 is an overall observation of the role of the patient from the view of its asymmetry to the agent. Several properties are presented from the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic perspectives. In the semantic aspect, to identify a patient role is more dependent on the verb phrase, whereas the agent role seems more independently identifiable by noun's animacy hierarchy. In the syntactic aspect, firstly, the patient is normally free-distributed in various positions in a sentence, whereas the agent tends to be close to the sentential-initial position. The second comparable syntactic feature is that the patient is more reliable on the case marker at the minor subject position than the agent. The third, the agent is more likely to control the referential properties of an NP in another clause than the patient.Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 are dealing with the role's change involving the agent and the patient in 'Ba-construction'. First of all, by revealing the semantic constraints and the path of metaphorical extensions, the argument nominal in interaction with verb semantics is presented. The nature of Ba's object can be explained from the view of the independent existence and the total affectedness, and the nature of subject can be explained as a responsible actor of the event. The ordered arrangement of Bal-construction can be well explained by some cognitive principles. The status of indefinite Ba-constructions and their implications are then discussed. It is shown that the grammatical functions of indefinite Ba-constructions are restricted to the marking of a generic proposition or the introducing of a trivial referent into the discourse.Chapter 6 observes the symmetries and asymmetries between Bei-constructions and Ba -constructions from the syntactic and semantic perspectives as following. On one hand, both constructions show high-transitivity property in the features of the higher affectedness and lower agency. On the other hand, the 'affectee' and 'causer' in these two constructions differ in direct affectedness vs. indirect affectedness, direct causation vs. indirect causation. These differences can be uniformly interpreted by the syntagmatic iconicity of a sentence: an indirect role tends to occupy the external argument position assigned by the prepositions Bei and Ba while a direct role tends to occupy the internal argument position.Chapter 7 motivates a construction approach to what has been called the 'double object construction' in Chinese linguistics. By defining a semantically coherent 'ditransitive' constructional schema whose prototype involves a verb expressing physical transfer of a Patient from a volitional Agent to a willing Recipient. It is shown how various extensions from this prototype can be considered to be instantiations of this constructional schema, since they are construed as involving various kinds of metaphorical transfer among some related cognitive domains, such as from physical domain to discourse domain, from present domain to future domain.To argue against the general acceptance of the 'take' type double object construction which is viewed as a mirror image of the 'give' type in Chinese, Chapter 8 discusses the syntactic and semantic nature of each NP in 'VN₁N₂' strings by observing all the four relational possibilities. It is argued that the number phrase and the possessor noun do not serve as an argument at all. The misleading analysis of the so called 'take' type double object construction is merely due to the similarity with 'take' type double object construction in prosodic structure.Adopting the hypothesis of the variability of argument structure relating to frequency, Chapter 9 deals with the argument variations of two pairs of highly-transitive verbs of manual action: the synonymous la and zhuai (to draw), reng and zhi (to throw) in Chinese texts. It is shown that the frequently used verb la is obviously in lower transitivity than the infrequent one zhuai, while the transitivity of least frequent verb zhi is not higher than the more frequent synonymy reng as expecting. It is argued that, the phenomena of low transitivity of la's argument structure are due to the high frequency effect, and the reduced syntactic fact of zhi is a result of diachronic change. It is also observed that the collocating abilities of zhi are increasing on the morphologic level meanwhile decreasing on the syntactic level.By integrating most of important notions applied in above chapters: agency, affectedness and relevant constructions, Chapter 10 is a case study on the so-called 'weak-agent' role. Although previous studies treat some grammatical roles as causers or responsible actors rather than as volitional agents, under what circumstances will an item serve as a weak-agent is remains unresolved. By examining on the real data involved weak-agency sentences, it is shown that, the unsuspected result meaning of the verb phrase is the determining factor. Referring to Max Weber's 'ethic of responsibility' theory, an explanation of weak-agent constrains is deduced: When a speaker takes the affected position of an event, his primary reaction is to demand the actor to take full responsibility rather than ask for the volitions of the actor. Therefore, constructions with complex verb phrase such as Ba-construction is a natural situation where weak-agent role will appear.