A Corpus-based Analysis Of Atypical Objects In Mandarin Chinese

This dissertation focuses on the atypical objects in Mandarin Chinese. The atypical objects in Mandarin Chinese are not obligatory arguments of verbs, which can occupy normal typical object positions under certain conditions, such as "chi shitang", "mo baihui","xie maobi", etc. The theta role of atypical objects contains Instrument, Location, Material, Manner, Goal, Role and Time, etc. The atypical objects in Madarin Chinese have special syntactic and semantic characteristics. This dissertation applies quantitative methods to make a whole survey of atypical objects in the Chinese Gigaword Corpus, and the survey covers all verbs of the "Verb Usage Dictionary" (1999). In this paper, the major theory is based on Lexical semantics-syntax interface combined with cognitive approach. The dissertation can be divided into three parts:the introduction, main body and conclusion.The introduction elaborates the research objects, research tasks, corpus resources, as well as significance of the research.In chapter 1 we present the background which identifies the definition of object and atypical object, and covers the previous research on atypical objects. Chapter 2 introduces the main ideas and research methodology of Lexical semantics-syntax interface.Chapter 3 to chapter 6 are the main body of the dissertation, which inspects the semantic and syntactic properties of atypical object. The Chinese Word Sketch (CWS) are employed to carry out a large-scale survey of atypical use of objects in naturally occurring texts. By using the CWS, a total of 1223 verbs were examined one by one to study if they have atypical object use through detailed manual analysis. The analysis reveals that there are only 74 out of 1223 verbs which have the atypical object use; there is no necessary relation between the frequency of the verb in question and its ability of taking atypical objects; all the verbs which can take atypical objects are monosyllable, and they are transitive and unergative verbs but no unaccusative. The theta role of the atypical objects could be divided into 8 kinds:Instrument, Location, Material, Manner, Goal, Role, Reason and Time. Chapter 4 analyses the semantic and syntactic properties of different kinds of atypical objects and the restriction of syntax, and draws the conclusion that the coexistence of typical object and atypical object is ungrammatical; all the atypical objects could be introduced by a preposition in the transformation; the atypical object cannot be modified by adverbial words, etc. Chapter 5 investigates the characteristic of verbs which could take atypical objects. Chapter 6 explicates the formation of atypical object based on the theories of Lexical semantics-syntax interface and cognitive linguistics. The atypical objects are considered to start from the lexical root, which conceptualizes a set of participants of the event, and then the atypical object is profiled by making a special and quite unnatural effort, which is subjective prominence. The atypical object is formed at last according to the projectionist approach.Chapter 7 is the typological study of the atypical object. Several languages belonging to various language families (including Sino-Tibetan family, Altaic family and Austronesian family) have been examined, such us:Zaiwa, Vietnamese, Miao, Finnish, Korean, etc. only some language from the Sino-Tibetan family could take atypical object, and they have similar characteristics with Mandarin Chinese with regard to atypical object.Finally the eighth chapter is the summary of the research. It covers the key research content, main innovation points, identifies the limitation of the study, and discusses the developmental trend of research.The research based on large-scale corpus, so it is reasonable to believe that the conclusion can reflect the real situation of language usage. The corpus based quantitative investigation is very helpful to fully understand this special language phenomenon in Chinese. The deep analysis of atypical objects supplements the study of VO construction. What’s more, it has important theoretical implication with regard to various components of the grammar, such as Argument Structure. Meanwhile, it will, to a certain degree, contribute to the proper formulation of the approach of teaching Chinese as a foreign language and Chinese information processing, and provide abundant resources for machine translation.