The Ba-Construction And Its Realizations In English

The Ba-construction is a basic syntactic pattern in modern Chinese, and it is often regarded as one of its characteristic grammatical phenomena. It has long attracted much attention from grammarians both at home and abroad. Yet it has been seldom studied from the perspective of contrastive linguistics. As a bold endeavor, this thesis, by taking a contrastive and a semantic approach to the issue, tries to find out how the Chinese Ba-construction is realized in English. The whole thesis consists of six chapters:Chapter One introduces the rationale of the thesis, its methodology, theoretical framework, and its organization.Chapter Two is a literature review, which mainly discusses various viewpoints about the grammatical meaning of the Ba-construction. An important conclusion from the discussion is that causative can unify the meanings of most types of Ba-construction, and that the construction is one of the basic syntactic patterns in Chinese for expressing causation.Chapter Three makes a semantic analysis of the Ba-construction within the framework proposed by Talmy (1976), and classifies the Ba-construction into various types according to the semantic types they belong to.Chapter Four discusses the English realizations of the agent Ba -construction, and Chapter Five deals with how the other types of the...