A Construction Grammar Analysis On Chinese Resultative Construction

Chinese Resultative Construction refers to this kind of construction: Verb+ Verb (Adjective), which means the act denoted by the preceding Verb causes the event denoted by the latter. This construction plays quite an important role in Mandarin and is used widely and frequently. Besides, it involves complicated syntactic and semantic features. Therefore, Chinese RC has always been attracting the attention of linguistic scholars. Previous studies attempt to explain such problems as its head, transitivity, and valence and so on, leaving the presupposed CAUSATION between the preceding verb and the following-up verb ignored to some degree. That's the right issue this thesis attempts to deal with.With the theory of Construction Grammar which originated from the background of Cognitive Linguistics, the author discusses Chinese RC from the perspective of syntax and semantics. Instances of RC are divided into different types according to their syntactical configuration assisted by their semantic features. They are: (i) SVROBJO Construction, (ii) SVRSUBJO Construction, (iii) SVRSUBJ Construction and (iv) SVRIND Construction. Construction (i) is different from Construction (ii) in that the Result complements are differently semantically oriented even though they share the syntactic configuration. So are Construction (iii) and (iv). While they share the basic constructional meaning of Cause-Result, they differ from each other with regard to sub-constructional concrete meaning.To account for the CAUSATION, it is quite necessary to discuss the verb meaning as well as the constructional meaning. The relationship between the participant roles of the constituent verbs of RC and the argument roles of the construction is the focus of this thesis. In different constructions, the two kinds of roles are differently mapped to each other.Construction Grammar approach could well explain the source of the CAUSATION in Chinese RC, and avoid the embarrassment in explaining such questions as why intransitive verbs could enter SVRO Construction or why some RCs are transitive while other not. The representation of the relationship between syntactic tier and semantic tier and the participant roles of verbs and argument roles of constructions clearly shows the differences between constructions.This thesis is of theoretical value. The success to account for the critical issue about Chinese RC evidences that Construction Grammar should be considered a brand new and workable approach to deal with Chinese constructions, even though a lot of work needs to be done to explore constructions in Chinese.