The Study On Syntax And Semantics Of Chinese V-R Construction

As a complex construction, Chinese V-R construction shows its special in its semanticmeanings and syntactic structure. So, in recent years, the features themselves have causedextreme concern in the linguistic study. In particular, as a kind of causative structure, ChineseV-R construction is an important syntactic structure. So, the study on its syntactic generation hasbecome more and more.The objectives of the study are mainly the syntactic representations of the basic ChineseV-R construction and the inverted causative structure. We discuss how the arguments of ourobjectives of the study project and be interpreted. The study assumes that the syntactic structureand the event structure are isomorphic. From this assumption, we do the research in the light ofthe predicate decomposition. The theoretic background involves Localist Theory (Jakendoff(1972,1983,1990)), Distributed Morphology (Halle&Marantz (1994)), Voice Hypothesis(Kratzer (1994,1996)) and Lexical Relational Structure (Hales&Keyser (1993)). Based onthese theories, we extend the Kratzer-Marantz verbal architecture to a more specific one. Andthen, this approach is employed into the syntactic representation of Chinese V-R construction.Specifically speaking, there are three functional heads involved in the verbal architecture: thefunctional head Voice takes the role of introducing the external argument; the little v bears therole of introducing event types; the root plays the role of introducing the internal argument orcomplement.The study shows: Chinese V-R construction is the compounding of events rather than thecompounding of predicates, and through the data analyzed in the thesis, we conclude there aretwo kinds of possible combinations, the eventive causative: vDO+vBE and the property orstative causative: vBE+vBE. Most of Chinese V-R constructions belong to the former one, andonly a few which denote the stative events belong to the latter one. Another work has also beendone in the thesis, that is, the classifications of the Chinese V-R construction from theperspective of the argument structure. Specifically, we obtain two main types: Chinese V-Rconstruction without causative argument and Chinese V-R construction with causative argument.And also, the latter one is divided into some smaller one. And then, based on the classification, amore detailed research on its syntactic representation has been done.It goes to show that it is advisable to analyze the Chinese V-R construction from theperspective of event structure. Meanwhile, the analysis is also extended into a special ChineseV-R construction–the inverted structure, which lend some determined support to the way ofanalysis.