THE SYNTAX, SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS OF CAUSATIVE, PASSIVE AND 'BA' CONSTRUCTIONS IN MANDARIN (CHINESE)

This study investigates the relationship between the formal semantic contribution of several linguistic structures and nonformal pragmatic strategies. In investigating this problem three structures are analyzed within a Montague Grammar framework. The primary focus is on the causative markers jiao and rang, the passive markers bei, gei, jiao and rang and the preposition ba. Although there are distributional differences among these forms the markers of the causative and passive and ba all take noun phrase complements to form phrases which modify verb phrases.;Further, reasons are given for analyzing the jiao and rang of the causative as the same lexical items as the jiao and rang of the passive respectively. To distinguish the causative from the passive uses of jiao and rang non-formal pragmatic strategies are posited. These strategies make reference to the formal semantic representations of sentences. They not only provide an account of the causative and passive understandings of various sentences but also allow for a systematic treatment of a wide range of ba-sentences which other analyses have failed to handle satisfactorily.;Besides this syntactic convergence many aspects of the formal semantic contribution of these forms is the same. They are all translated into the logic as predicates which denote a relation between two arguments, an individual and a proposition. The first argument, the individual, corresponds to the sentential subject, while the second argument, the proposition, is formed by joining together the translation of the noun phrase complement of one of the above forms and the modified verb phrase. Under this analysis not only the causative but also the passive and the ba-construction are treated as argument adding structures.