| The purpose of this dissertation is to study the semantic and pragmatic constraints governing the occurrence of the verb-copying construction, (V O V Complement), in Mandarin Chinese. The verb-copying construction is examined first in the context of Chinese word order in general and then constituent order specific to the verb-copying construction. Although verb-copying is a sentence/utterance level phenomenon, it is shown in this study that the occurrence of verb-copying in an utterance is determined not only by the aspectual meaning of the predicate, but also by the pragmatic function of the utterance in discourse.; There are six chapters in this dissertation. Chapters 1 and 6 are the introduction and conclusions respectively. Chapter 2 provides a critical review of previous studies on this verb-copying issue. Inadequacies in these studies are shown to give justification for the present study.; The core of this dissertation is presented in Chapters 3, 4, and 5, drawing on the Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP), as established by Prague school linguists; aspectual classes of verbs, as proposed by Vendler (1967) and Dowty (1979, 1986); and discourse grounding, as discussed by Hopper (1979a, 1979b, 1979c, etc.). I argue in Chapter 3 that the basic word order of verb-copying construction complies with pragmatic/functional principles that govern Chinese word order in general. In Chapter 4, I propose that the occurrence of verb-copying is conditioned by the aspectual structure of the predicate at the sentence level. The verb-copying sentence denotes the semantic notion of stativity or non-change; its non-verb-copying counterpart, if any, signals dynamism or change-of-state. In the light of the data elicited from thirty native speakers of Mandarin Chinese, Chapter 5 demonstrates that variations of the verb-copying construction are demonstrates that variations of the verb-copying construction are constrained by pragmatic/discoursal factors such as foregrounding and backgrounding. The verb-copying construction carries the discourse backgrounding information and its non-verb-copying counterpart the discourse foregrounding information.; In conclusion, this study claims that syntactic phenomena in Chinese, as exemplified by the verb-copying construction, are more often than not governed by non-structural factors and therefore must be examined from semantic and pragmatic perspectives. |
