The Syntactic Analysis Of The Possessum-object Construction In Chinese

The possessum-object construction is a kind of unique syntactic structure which has been a heated topic and focus in Chinese linguistics since the 1950's. With regard to this special linguistic phenomenon, many linguists have analyzed it and shown us some reasonable explanations within the frameworks of different theories, especially Xu Jie (1999), Han Jingquan (2000), Wen Binli and Chen Zongli (2001) and Sun Jinwen and Wu Yaqing (2003). They have made a great success in accounting for the possessum-object construction. They assume that the preverbal NP is moved out of the whole possessive NP after the predicate verb and then raised to the subject position of the sentence by movement. At the same time, they also think that the two different Surface Structures of Possessor Raising come from the same Deep Structure and have the same semantic interpretation. However, we find that there are still some unsolved problems according to Possessor Raising. Therefore, this thesis doesn't accept the thought of Possessor Raising, and based on the linguistic facts we further propose that the preverbal NP is base-generated rather than being moved out. And this thesis also thinks that the two different Surface Structures are not from the same Deep Structure and they have different semantic interpretations.This thesis makes an attempt to propose another new method within the framework of the event syntax. Firstly, the author introduces the event structure and the event syntax theory in detail, and this theory assumes that the predicate verb and the object should be quantized if a sentence denotes a delimited event. Secondly, the author detailedly analyzes the syntactic characteristics of the possessum-object construction in terms of the event. And the possessum-object construction denotes a delimited event, and this event consists of the two subevents. Then this thesis studies the derivation of the possessum-object construction within the framework of the event syntax and proves that the preverbal NP is base-generated and occupies the subject position as an UNDERGOER or AFFECTEE. Then the author proposes that there is a broad possession relation in the possessum-object construction from the syntactic aspect and verb semantics. Finally, these thesis shows that there are requirements on the possessum-object construction.As for the analysis of the possessum-object construction, the author rejects Possessor Raising and adopts the event syntaxes of Borer (1994, 1996), Benua and Borer (1996), Travis (1994, 1997, 2000a) and Ritter and Rosen (1998, 2000) to account for this special phenomenon. And this thesis proposes that the preverbal NP is base-generated and gives a reasonable explanation of the possessum-object construction. Therefore, we can conclude that the two different Surface Structures are not from the same Deep Structure. However, this thesis also has its own limitation: this thesis only studied the possessum-object construction in Chinese without applying it to other languages. Therefore, the further research on the possessum-object construction should be continued.