Argument Sharing In Chinese Serial Verb Construction

This thesis aims at determining the scope of SVC in Chinese and exploring the phenomenon of argument sharing in this construction in order to determine the status of the shared arguments.Serial Verb Construction refers to the construction with two or more than two verbs without any overt maker of connection in a sentence. SVC is widely used in the languages of West Africa, Southeast Asia and Oceania which share the feature that there is no inflectional variation in these languages.The thesis first presents a review on the previous studies. Linguists who study SCV show divergence on the issue whether SVC is a basic construction in Chinese. Linguists such as Lu~[1], Wang~[2] and Zhu~[3] claim that: SVC is a basic construction in Chinese while those who argue that setting up such a category will cause confusion make use of the tests of sentence accent and word insertion~[4][5] to support their idea of eliminating SVC. In spite of the fact that most linguists treat SVC as a basic construction in Chinese, they have different ideas as to the scope of SVC.This thesis proposes that when defining SVC, we should take into account the relationship between verbs and that between the verb and the argument in an SVC, that is, there is no relationship of coordination, subordination or syntactic dependency of other sort between verbs and all the verbs describe the same subject. As Chinese is a language without inflectional variation, Temporal Sequence Principle~[6] is an important principle to follow, which can also helps us to distinguish SVC from other similar constructions. In addition, we can also employ the relationship between the verb and the argument to redefine this construction.According to the studies done by Baker~[7] and Collins~[8], the shared internal argument is obligatory in SVC while this thesis proposes that in Chinese, it is the shared external argument instead of the shared internal argument that is obligatory as all verbs in SVC should describe the same subject. Only when all verbs describe the same object can there be a shared internal argument. In Chinese SVCs, some sentences may contain both shared external argument and shared internal argument.According to the conclusion of this thesis, the shared arguments in Chinese SVC are empty categories. Compared with the empty categories in English, those in Chinese are freer. The shared external argument in Chinese SVC is PRO while the shared internal argument is a...