The Event Structure Approach To Resultative Verb Construction In Mandarin Chinese

Resultative construction describes events with a definite end point with the first verb denoting activity and the second verb or adjective denoting state. In Mandarin Chinese, resultative construction is mainly realized as V-R resultative construction, DE construction, etc. This thesis centers around the former type for its important role in illuminating the nature of lexical semantics and its relationship with syntax on the one hand and with conceptual semantics on the other. In view of the fact there is controversy concerning whether resultative construction should be treated as a compound or phrase, for case of exposition, we will use resultative verb construction (RVC) as a cover term unless otherwise specified. Our research focuses on the following issues: derivation, interpretation and causativization of Mandarin resultative verb construction.After a comprehensive review of the strength and weakness of previous studies, syntactic and semantic perspective alike, we decide on the event structure approach and argue that argument and event structure are two sides of the same coin. We follow Lin (2004) in that there are three universal verbalizing heads or event predicates, i. e. DO, BECOME and BE, representing activity, inchoativity and stativity respectively. They introduce arguments into syntax and license ontological event types of sentences that fall into Vendler's (1967) aspectual classes by combining with one another. The verbs, on the other hand, are categoryless verbal roots with only idiosyncratic information for syntactic derivation rather than explicit semantic or syntactic information. They gain their categorical status by associating with event predicates. Being phonetically empty, the event predicates triggers a serial of head movements under the principle of Late Insertion, in which verbal roots, as event modifiers, are pied-piped along.We argue for the idea that resultative verb construction is derived in syntax, only that arguments are introduced into syntax by event predicates rather than verbs alone. We follow Huang's Generalized Control Theory (GCR) and Minimal Distance Principle (MDP) in explaining the interpretation of result predicates and the complicated cases in Mandarin Chinese. As for the intertwined relation between resultative and causative construction, we believe the key lies in the introduction of causation. Inspired by Liina's (2002) bieventive analysis, we argue that causativization describes the relationship between two events rather than an entity and an event. The external argument is introduced by the functional projection Voice. Similar to Japanese adversity causatives and Finnish desiderative causatives, Mandarin Chinese also presents cases when a causing event is introduced into syntax independently from an external argument. Such an analysis can in turn be employed to explain the ambiguity of some resultative construction and passivization asymmetry.