A Syntactic Study On Universalism Of Resultatives In English And Mandarin Chinese

Resultatives refer to the syntactic structures which are composed of a matrix verb and a result-denoting complement. Resultatives in English and Chinese attract the attention of linguists all the time. The scholars on resultative research are, as they were, split into two groups: formalists and functionalists.However, previous studies in the west only focus on English resultatives within the framework of Universal Grammar (UG) taking the formalist approach, while studies at home pay more attention to the description of Chinese resultatives or the comparison between English and Chinese resultatives. Hence scholars at home exaggerate the differences between English resultatives and their Chinese counterparts, neglecting the universalism between them. Sybesma (1999) did a lot on resultatives, but his research was Chinese-resultatives-oriented. He never did his research from the perspective of universalism, which is centered on in this paper.Within the theoretical framework of Universal Grammar, especially within Minimalist Program, the present paper deals with Chinese resultatives from the perspective of UG, taking formalist approach. Specifically, this study devotes itself to the universalism between English and Chinese resultatives. A new categorization which seems to be syntactically more reasonable is put forward on the basis of earlier classifications of resultatives. The syntactic operations such as merge, agree, movement and feature checking in MP pave the way for the unified explanation. The reanalysis of Simpson's Direct Object Restriction (DOR) proves that the underlying object position on the tree is base-generated, not at random. Then the elaborations on functional heads which provide the motivation of movement make the argument strong and convincing. We also make a comparison between core functional categories in English and their counterparts in Chinese. In the end, we find that resultatives in English and Chinese respectively observe and display universalism with the difference only being that the features of core functional categories are strong or less strong. Some apparent differences should not give us excuses that Chinese is an exceptional or marginal language as we thought before. Furthermore, some parameters are set by researchers at will when they faced with seemingly mysterious phenomena. Even worse, some researchers labeled them as"peripheral". We can safely say that parameter setting is groundless and is lacking in convincing evidence; it constitutes barriers for language acquisition thus breaching the explanatory adequacy which is one of UG conditions. Needless to say, labeling them as"peripheral"manifests the misunderstanding of the essence of UG.The present study will shed light on future studies of resultatives. The universalism of English and Chinese resultatives is required to be taken into consideration. Though this study is rudimentary, it is believed that it provides a brand-new perspective to the future study in this field.