A Comparative Study Of Light Verbs In The English And Chinese Languages

The light verb is an important concept in generative grammar, but no consensus has been reached about it. For example, some scholars believe that the light verb has no phonetic form and only has syntactic functions, On the other hand, some other scholars maintain that"make"and"let"in English and"弄","搞"and"被"are overt light verbs --- light verbs with phonetic form. As for the selection property of the light verb, most scholars believe that the light verb selects VP as its complement. However, some scholars of Chinese linguistics believe that the light verb can select other categories such as adjectives as its complement and transform these categories into verbs.The purpose of this thesis is to make a further study into the nature of light verbs within the framework of generative grammar from a comparative perspective. The thesis proposes five assumptions regarding the nature of the light verb: (1) The light verb is a functional category of the sentence, which expresses eventualities. (2) The light verb is affixal in nature and must be adjoined to another lexical category. (3) There are two methods of satisfying this requirement: verb movement and Generalized Transformation. (4) The light verb selects XP (any kind of phrases) as its complement. (5) The light verb has no phonetic form.Though this thesis is aimed at studying the light verb theory, instead of resolving specific linguistic phenomena, we cannot conduct theoretical analysis without discussing specific linguistic phenomena. Therefore, while studying the light verb theory, we also offer new methods of explanation for the following linguistic phenomena: the syntactic status of causative verbs in English, the syntactic status of linking verbs in English and the structure of Bei-construction in Chinese. Meanwhile, these linguistic phenomena can also offer support to the assumptions about the light verb put forward in this thesis.