| Usually only a verb can be followed by an object in contemporary Chinese.3ut there are also cases that an adjective is put in a predicate position and followed by an object. How to define the adjective in such a position? What is its3art of speech? Has it transformed into a verb? Or is it just used as a verb:emporarily? Should it be regarded as an adjective all the same or as a verb in such a position? There was such kind of usage in ancient Chinese. Then is it just remains of ancient Chinese usage? Or is it also a normal usage of adjectives? This involves how to define the functional attributes of the two large categories: verbs and adjectives. So it is important to scrutinize the phenomenon.Based on what has already been done by the previous researchers, first, this dissertation analyzes each adjective listed in Chinese dictionary, and sees whether it can be put in a predicate position and followed by an object. Second, a questionnaire is designed to test the acceptability of different adjective-object phrases. Third, a corpus is built up and the distribution of adjective-object phrases in the corpus is examined. Fourth, an explanation is given to the phenomenon existing both in contemporary Chinese and ancient Chinese with the light verb theory in formal linguistic framework. And last, the internal and external factors affecting the popularity and acceptability of different adjective-object phrases are examined.There are eight chapters in this dissertation.In the first chapter, an introduction of the dissertation is given. First, the phenomenon of adjectives taking objects has been raised, and then the goal and significance of the research are put forward. And the main process of the research includes, first, combing the research done by previous researchers, analyzing the types of various adjectives, introspecting different adjectives’ possibility of taking objects, designing a questionnaire to test the acceptability of different adjective-object phrases, checking the phenomenon in corpus and giving an explanation by light verb theory in the formal linguistic framework. The important and tough parts are questionnaire survey, corpus building and checking, and syntactic explanation. With static and dynamic, qualitative and quantitative, diachronic and synchronic, descriptive and explanative analyses, a thorough understanding and explanation of the phenomenon are expected to achieve.In the second chapter, the previous research is combed and summarized, from the part of speech an adjective in an adjective-object construction should belong to, the types the adjective-object construction can be divided into, the quantitive research done previously, to the explanations of the phenomenon from different angles. Comments are given to the previous research and what still needs to be done in the future is also pointed out.In the third chapter, an introspective research is made. First, different types of adjectives from the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (the fifth edition) are collected. Then focusing on the causative meaning of the adjective in the adjective-object construction, the writer tries to find out the monosyllabic and disyllabic adjectives which can be used in the adjective-object construction, based on the writer’s language intuition. By investigating the adjectives which can be put into the adjective-object construction, it is found that there are always some in both qualitative adjectives, descriptive adjectives that can be put in the adjective-object construction. As for the attribute adjectives, there are some which can possibly get the expected meaning, but the expressions with attribute adjectives put in the adjective-object construction sound awkward to one’s ear. Investigating the adjectives which can be put naturally in the adjective-object construction, we find that the adjectives’innate likeliness to be caused to become the state described by the adjective is a decisive factor for the adjective in the possibility of entering the adjective-object construction.In the fourth chapter, a questionnaire is designed to test the acceptability difference among different types of adjectives taking objects as well as adjectives with different lexical construction types including subject-predicate, predicate-object, modifier-core, core-complement and parallel structures. The result shows that the different types and different lexical constructions of adjectives may affect the acceptability when they enter the adjective-object construction. But more tests should be made before a definite conclusion can be reached.In the fifth chapter, a corpus of literature works with36,800,000characters is built, from which,10,000,000characters are sampled to be annotated and readproofed and data is collected. From the data collected from the corpus, a conclusion can be made that the monosyllabic adjectives are more active than disyllabic ones, and qualitative adjectives are more active than the descriptive adjectives. There are cases that both monosyllabic adjectives and disyllabic ones are found to have objects in the corpus. Examining the data, we find that monosyllabic adjectives are more often used to have an object than the disyllabic adjectives. Another finding is that there are some cases in which descriptive adjectives do have objects. These are counterexamples which challenge people’s belief that descriptive adjectives cannot enter the adjective-object construction. But in the corpus, no cases of attribute adjectives taking objects are found.In the sixth chapter, the light verb theory is introduced and a hypothesis is put forward that there exists a light verb BE/BECOME in adjective-as-predicate sentences in contemporary Chinese. With this light verb, we can unify the difference between Chinese and English with Chinese having both an overt light verb "shi (BE)" and a covert light verb "shi (BE)", while English having only an overt light verb "BE".With light verb theory, an explanation is given to the different semantic types of adjective-object constructions. It is found that besides light verb "BE", there are also other light verbs in adjective-object constructions. The light verbs are CAUSE, CONSIDER, TREAT, FOR, THAN, EXIST, etc. When the light verbs exist covertly without any phonetic form, it will attract the lower adjective it c-commands to move upward and merge with it. Of course, when forming a sentence, the speaker can also choose to pick up a lexical light verb, so we can get shi (使)-sentence, bi (比) sentence and the sentences with different prepositions introducing the objects, etc.In the seventh chapter, we investigate the internal and external factors which affect the acceptability and popularity of adjective-object construction. The first internal reason is the descriptiveness of adjectives. It is believed that a word formed from a monosyllable to a disyllable gains more descriptiveness in it. Only when the disyllabic adjective is used very often can its descriptiveness be worn out gradually. The second internal reason is rhythm. In contemporary Chinese, after the disyllabification, disyllable has become a normal prosodic unit, which causes multisyallabic adjectives less likely to enter the adjective-object construction.The external reason is that after the disyllabification, the verb-resultative structure came into being, as well as the compound verbs formed by the same structure, words formed by adding "hua"(化) to adjectives. Another reason is that more prepositions appeared, which people can turn to and make the expression more precise and ambiguity is avoided. All the structure and the type of words mentioned above share the role of adjectives in adjective-object constructions. So the use of adjective-object construction is just one choice rather than the main choice or the first choice.Next, the differences between a typical verb and an adjective being used to take an object are examined. It is revealed that, unlike a typical verb, which can be identified as a verb by itself, an adjective needs conditions to help it enter the adjective-object construction, such as the selection of a proper object, the use of dynamic auxiliaries "zhe, le, guo", directional verbs, the reduplication of the adjective itself, the need of symmetric structures, negative words, modal verbs, and other sentential or super-sentential elements, etc. In short, an adjective cannot enter the adjective-object construction freely. The reason is that it is a marked collocation for an adjective to take object.Then, the difference between Chinese and English as for whether an adjective can be a predicate directly lies in the fact that there are only overt light verbs in English, therefore, no head-to-head movement is triggered, while in Chinese, there are both overt light verbs and covert light verbs. When a covert light verb is chosen, it must trigger the adjective it c-commands to move up and merge with it. That’s why there is no adjective-object construction in English while there is such a construction in Chinese.And last, the writer’s opinion as for how to determine the part of speech of the adjectives in an adjective-object construction is put forward. The writer prefers to believe that the part of speech of the adjectives in an adjective-object construction should be determined according to the context. They should not simply and totally be classified as adjectives or verbs just because they enter the construction.In the eighth chapter, the main contribution and the limitations of the present research are summarized and the future research directions are pointed out.The originality of the present research is as follows:First, a multi-dimensional research is carried out including introspective research, questionnaire survey, corpus search and formal syntactic explanation to ensure an adequate description and explanation of the phenomenon. Second, the adjective-object phenomenon existing both in contemporary and ancient Chinese is explained with the light verb theory in the formal linguistic framework.Third, a corpus of about36,000,000characters is built, from which,10,000,000characters are sampled to be annotated and proofread and the related adjective frequency data is used in the quantitive research.The limitation of the dissertation is as follows:First, in designing the questionnaire, the choice of the comparative items and the collocation of adjectives and objects cannot be guaranteed to be the best choice, because factors affecting the acceptability of an adjective-object phrase may be complicated and some factors are out of the designer’s control. In the future research, a more detailed study on the factors will be made before the design of the questionnaire.Second, there are not adequate subjects in the questionnaire survey because of the lack of time and constraints of finance. In the future research, an online questionnaire survey may be taken as a better choice to ensure a large number of subjects.Third, the processing of the corpus data is not very adequate. One reason is that in building the corpus, no enough consideration is given to the time or work of processing and proofreading the data in the corpus. The10,000,000characters’ proofreading can only satisfy the liability on the high frequency region.Future prospect:Improve the present corpus and make it better used in the future linguistic research.Enlarge the scope of the data. From the relationship between dialect divergence and ancient Chinese, we can infer that there remains more ancient Chinese lexicon and usage of ancient Chinese grammar in the dialects in Min, Yue, Hong Kong and Taiwan. So we will enlarge the scope to include the dialects listed above and make the research deep and thorough in the future. |
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