Empirical studies of interactions of semantic roles: The Agent and Patient in Mandarin Chinese

This dissertation investigates the interaction between form and function in Mandarin Chinese by empirically examining the interactions of core semantic roles (Agent and Patient) and the syntactic representation of those interactions in semantically transitive events. First, I demonstrate that syntactic structures and functions are intertwined with each other in the definition and identification of discourse notions like topic in traditional treatments of form and function interactions. Then I conduct two empirical studies of the interaction of semantic roles Agent and Patient. One study utilizes text counts (transcribed naturally occurring oral narrative stories), and the other study presents an experiment called the FishFilm paradigm (eliciting un-line descriptions of transitive events). In the text counts study, I identify which syntactic forms or constructions are employed to represent interactions of the semantic roles of the Agent and the Patient in Chinese and observe that topicality of core arguments in naturally occurring connected discourse relates to word or argument order in Mandarin. The FishFilm experiment is a computer-animated fish film that depicts transitive events of one fish eating another fish. Through this experiment, I investigate what syntactic forms or constructions, appearing in the text counts, are used in on-line discourse to describe the events involving interactions of the Agent and the Patient. This allows us to establish a causal relationship that defines the interaction between form and function in Mandarin.