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Locative Verbs In English And Chinese: A Contrastive Analysis

Posted on:2012-07-22Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:G Z SunFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155330335958519Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
The phenomenon of English locative alternation has attracted much attention in linguistic study. This paper attempts a comparison of locative verbs in English and Chinese, focusing on the features of their syntactic behavior. In English, some locative verbs can appear in two different forms, and the relationship between the two forms is accounted for by scholars from the perspective of the lexical rule and the constructional grammar. Besides, it is found that the two forms of locative use manifest the "holistic/partitive" alternation. However, in the structures of Chinese locative verbs, the holistic meaning is usually specified by means of the lexicon.Through the contrast between the two forms of locative alternation and their Chinese equivalents, it is found that the difference exists between the surface structures of locative verbs in English and Chinese. Considering such difference, this study makes a contrastive analysis between English and Chinese locative verbs in a conceptual structure perspective, and finds that when the place argument is perceived as a goal, the two kinds of verbs show similar grammatical behavior and they are equal in meaning. When the place argument is perceived as a whole, English locative verbs conflate the conceptual feature "d" (d denotes the feature of distributive location), so the feature "d" need not be realized in the surface structure, while Chinese locative verbs don't conflate the feature "d", hence the feature "d" needs to be realized in the surface structure. From that perspective, English is synthetic while Chinese is analytical.The difference in surface structures of locative verbs in English and Chinese shows that when the same conceptual meaning is expressed, the two kinds of verbs use different syntactic structures. When observed in a construction grammar perspective, the two forms of locative alternation are two specific structures in English. The holistic meaning showed by the location variant is what the construction itself gives to the verb. In Chinese, the holistic meaning is usually specified by the word man'full', forming a "Vman" structure. The structure has the following four features. First, in the "Vman" structure, if theme and place argument are bare nouns, theme must be indefinite and the place argument must be definite. If the place argument has an indefinite grammatical marker before it, it can be indefinite. Second, in the "Vman" structure, the place argument is always holistically perceived as a location, so the directional verbs are not allowed to appear in surface structure. Third, when the action of "Vman" reaches its endpoint, the word le'aspectual word'becomes indispensable, if we don't consider the context. Fourth, if "Vman" is regarded as one word, an unaccusative verb. Besides, these features are shared by both the locative verb and other verbs co-occurred with the word man. So these features can be regarded as the syntactic rules particularly related to the use of the word man appearing in the "Vman" structure.
Keywords/Search Tags:locative verb, conceptual structure, locative alternation, "Vman"structure
PDF Full Text Request
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