A Study Of The Subject Selection In Chinese Resultative Construction From The Causal-chain Windowing Perspective

Chinese Resultative Construction is a characteristic structure in Chinese syntactic system and has drawn great attention of many linguists and researchers. Chinese RC is simple and flexible in structure but rich in semantics. The high productivity and complexity of the special construction mainly lies in the internal combination modes and semantic relations. All of these make it more complicated than English Resultatives. The present thesis is just to explore one manifestation of such complexity, that is, the multiplicity of the subject selection in Chinese RC.Adopting a cognitive linguistic approach as well as a constructional language view, and with Chinese RCs as the research subject, the current research paper attempts to give a causal-chain windowing explanation of the subject selection in Chinese RCs. Following Talmy's causal-chain windowing theory, this paper argues that the multiplicity of the subject selection in Chinese RCs well reflects a cognitive mechanism governing people's producing and organizing languages, that is, the speaker always purposefully selects certain event details or semantic constituents of the event frame and puts it in the foreground or focus of attention while gapping the rest. With the given information, the hearer will be able to infer the remainder of the event frame and correctly understand the utterance.The present study shows that each of the Chinese RCs can activate a complex causal-chain event frame. Whether the various semantic elements of the causal-chain could be explicitly expressed in the syntactic structure, and how they appear in the syntactic structure are closely related to the utterer's attentional windowing: only the semantic elements windowed can be syntactically realized in the surface sentence, and what's more, different windowing processes of the same referent causal-chain event may result in different syntactic expressions. As regards the subject selection of Chinese RCs, we find that there are three types, a total of sixteen kinds of argument roles can be windowed and realized as the subject of the RCs. On the one hand, this further shows the diversity and complexity of the RC in semantics and the high flexibility of it in usage, on the other hand it proves that the causal-chain windowing theory can well account for the cognitive processes involved in the production and interpretation of Chinese RCs. In addition, by elaborating our opinion on the semantic constraints on the realization of causal-chain windowing mechanism, we hold that the subject selection of Chinese RCs is either selective or coercive.The present study is of theoretical value and practical significance. By qualitative analysis of the linguistic data we collected, the present thesis accounts systematically for the multiplicity of subjects in Chinese RCs. The combination of the causal-chain event frame and the construction grammar mechanism of representing constructions provides a formalized depiction and interpretation of the process and result of the attentional windowing and clearly shows the argument structure and internal semantic relations of the RC, all of which can well explicate the formation of the surface construction. Besides, the study is hoped to be helpful for Chinese language teaching to foreigners.