A New Generative Grammar Study Of Chinese PSPO Sentence

PSPO sentence, referring to sentences like Li Si lan le yi kuang ping guo andWang Mian si le fu qin，is an intriguing construction in Chinese, in which two nounphrases, occurring before and after an intransitive verb respectively, seem to be thesubject and object of the intransitive verb, which is obviously illogical.Major existing generative grammar approaches to PSPO sentence，followingBurzio Internal Argument Hypothesis, take the intransitive verb in PSPO sentence asunaccusative verb of which the only argument is its internal argument, resulting in atheoretic mess concerning case assignment and case driven move. On basis ofrevealing the redundancies and contradictions of these studies, the thesis makes useof Existential Verb Hypothesis and Frame Hypothesis to explain PSPO sentence in anew, unified and rigid way。The thesis maintains that PSPO sentence is a special type of Chineseexistential sentence. Verbs used in this sentence pattern are mostly commonexistential verb and other verbs that originally are not existential verb areexistentialized verb. Existential verb is semantically and syntactically different fromunergative verb and unaccusative verb in that it has two kinds of sentence structure:[NP [VP]] and [[VP] NP]. Frame Hypothesis maintains that all human languagesshare a common logic structure [NP [VP]], of which the constituents are not in linearrelations but in logic ones. All grammatical sentences including PSPO sentence areallowed by this logic frame and therefore are base-generated, and there is notraditionally supposed move involved..In PSPO sentence, the possessee and the existential verb construct thesubject-predicate structure of PSPO sentence and the traditionally deemed inversionis actually the sentence order parameter of existential sentence allowed by FrameHypothesis and decided by subcategorization of existential verb. The possessor is anadjunct attached to the basic subject-predicate structure. On syntactic-semanticinterface, the possessor is a topic and the proposition is the comment which as awhole denotes an event state, which is new information, about the possessor.