A Typological Study Of The English And Chinese Resultatives

Taking the English and Chinese resultatives in corpora as research subjects, this paper mainly focuses on the typological analysis and description of similarities and differences of English and Chinese resultatives. Both two languages have abundant syntactic forms to express resultative concept. Chinese often adopts the analytical expression, namely two deep-level semantic concepts expressed as the combination of two language units at surface level, while the corresponding English expression can employ not only analytical method but also synthesizing method. So in order to select the comparative parameters, this paper takes the analytical resultative as studying subject.As for previous studies on resultative construction, many scholars have conducted detailed researches on its type, syntax and semantics, but limited on inter-language comparison or the typological study. This paper, within the framework of typology, conducted a relatively thorough comparative study on English and Chinese, aiming to find their typological properties. In order to preserve the thoroughness of theoretical explanation, iconicity, grammaticalization, conceptual metonymy and prototype theory of cognitive linguistics are implied. In researching methodology, this paper adopted the combined research methods of the qualitative and quantitative studies, as well as data statistic method. This paper covers two language types, SVO and SOV, among which, there are1500English sentences and1800Chinese sentences, as well as10minority languages and foreign languages.This paper has investigated English and Chinese resultatives from the following three aspects. First, we have investigated the basic word order of English and Chinese resultatives, as well as that of other languages in SVO and SOV systems, aiming to conclude its basic word order and word order properties. Second, the syntactic types and markedness have been taken into consideration. We find that in English, SVOR and SVR belong to unmarked forms while SVRO marked. And in Chinese, unmarked forms include SVRO, SVR and "ba" resultatives while marked ones SOVR, SV1OV2R, SVRO1O2and SV1O1V2RO2. At last, we have concluded two grammatical hierarchies, namely the grammatical hierarchies of causer selection and complement selection.This paper has some theoretical and practical values. First, it is quite instructive for the learners to acquire English and Chinese resultative structure by grasping their universals. In addition, it also has practical meaning for English teaching and teaching Chinese as a foreign language. At last, this research is also helpful to English-Chinese translation.