A Contrastive Study Of The Resultative Construction In English And Chinese

As an important linguistic phenomenon the resultative construction (RC) occupies a unique place in the study of syntax and semantics. It has been a major focus of research on the syntax-semantics interface both in English and Chinese for recent decades. It makes great sense to conduct a systematic contrastive study of the RC in English and Chinese, for the findings will surely help us to gain a better understanding of the nature of the construction as well as the nature of the Universal Grammar. With this belief the thesis aims at exposing and explaining the similarities and differences of the RC between English and Chinese with a qualitative and quantitative method.How we set about comparing the RC in English and Chinese depends on what we treat as the tertium comparationis of the contrastive study, i.e. what we assume to be shared by English and Chinese RC, against which the differences we find may be stated. Roughly speaking, what we regard as the tertium comparationis of this study is the cause-and-effect reading and the complex event structure the RC bears.The main body of the thesis is composed of two parts. Chapter One is the first part. This part is an overview of some significant researches on the RC in English and Chinese. It offers a sketchy analysis of the syntactic and semantic features of the RC both in English and in Chinese and lays the foundation for a cross-linguistic comparison by giving a unified description of the properties of the English and Chinese RC. This part also defines the English RC and Chinese RC respectively. A unified definition of the RC in English and Chinese should be "a construction which consists of a primary predicate and a resultative predicate with the former indicating the causing action or event, and the latter the resulting state or event".The second part, including Chapter Two to Chapter Four, makes a detailed comparison in regard to the semantic reference, event structure, and transitivity ofEnglish and Chinese RCs.Chapter Two elaborates the semantic referential properties of the RC in English and Chinese, especially the Direct Object Restriction (DOR) on the resultative predicate. In this chapter I argue the rule of DOR cannot be applied to all Chinese RCs, and advance a novel angle to explain the reason by examining the two evolutive ways of the Chinese RC. In addition, I explore the relation between the semantic reference of V2 and the semantic focus of the resultative sentence and assert that the semantic focus of the resultative sentence falls on the V2 when it is predicated of the subject, and when it is predicated of the object the semantic focus of the sentence can fall on either the V1 or V2. In Chapter Three I argue that the V2 can be used to delimit an activity both in English and Chinese, therefore the RC is an important means to express the telic sense in these two languages. What's more, I prove that there is indeed a cause-and-effect reading with all the RCs. On the basis of this I point out that each resultative monoclausal sentence is a complexity event consisting of two subevents, between which there is a cause-and-effect relation. Then I carry on an investigation of the RC in C-E translation. Chapter Four is the exploration of the transitivity of the resultative sentence from the aspect of Hopper and Thompson's Transitivity Hypothesis and asserts there is high transitivity with the resultative sentence, which mainly derives from the telic and causative reading of the RC.Finally, based on the detailed comparison in the above sections I briefly conclude:The similarities between the English and Chinese RC are:i. they are composed of two parts—the verbal primary predicate V1 and the resultative secondary predicate V2, with the V1 denoting an action and the V2 denoting the result brought by the V1;ii. there is an inherently telic reading with the RC for the V2 has the ability to delimit an activity;iii. the monoclausal resultative sentence can be decomposed into two...