| Caused-motion construction is a prevailing linguistic phenomenon in manylanguages. Experts all over the world have adopted many approaches in the study of it.This thesis tries to use a top-down and bottom-up method, basing on ConstructionGrammar that pointed out by Goldberg, analyzing English Caused-MotionConstruction and Chinese Caused-Motion Construction respectively. As well acomparison is discussed between them.The English Caused-Motion Construction can be defined structurally as:[SUBJ[V OBJ OBL]](V is a nonstative verb and OBL is a directional phrase). The basicsemantics of this construction is “X CAUSE Y to MOVE Z”., which means that thecauser argument directly causes the theme argument to move along a path designatedby the directional phrase. The syntactic properties of it can be represented by theformula “NP1+V+NP2+PP”. Since the construction’s semantic properties are notcompositionally derived from its inserted lexical items and other constructionsexisting in the grammar, it represented as a pairing of the form and meaningindependently in the linguistic. The integration between the verb and the constructionof the ECMC is analyzed in this thesis. In addition, four extending senses of theECMC’s basic form are introduced. As well, the semantic constraints are discussed inthe English Caused-Motion Construction。The Chinese Caused-Motion Construction is a very complex systematic family,for there are plenty of syntactic forms in Chinese can be used to express acaused-motion meaning. Basically, its semantics can also be generalized as “XCAUSES Y TO MOVE Z”. Generally,“BA (把) Sentences”,“SHI (使) Sentences”,“DE (得) Sentences”,“Shi-Cheng (使成) Sentences”,“Shi-Ling (使令) Sentences”“The Resultative Construction (动结式)” can all be concluded in the team ofrepresenting caused-motion sense in Chinese. Syntactically, it can be represented as “NP1+VP1+NP2+VP2”, in which VP1is the marked verb “把、使、让、叫、令”and so on in CCMC that is in charge of controlling the NP2with an extensiveemotional ingredient in the construction, and it is the VP2that expresses the movingor change of the state of the patient which is always represented as “V+prepositionsuch as direction state (出，上，进) and so on”. As the argument of ECMC, theparticipants of verb and construction that integrated with each are also analyzed in theChinese part.Based on the above analysis, this paper concludes some similarities anddifferences between ECMC and CCMC by discussing the conception of causative, thesemantics of them and the constructional form of them. As a necessary construction,the caused-motion construction exists independently in both English and Chinese.Both of them semantically convey the same meaning more or less-the agent producesa direct force to the patient to make it move along a path. They all include the agent,the patient, the force, and the path in their construction. Similarities can also be foundin their event structure and conceptual structure. However, since Englishcaused-motion construction is unitary, the moving part of the entity is alwaysrepresented by PP, while Chinese caused-motion construction is much morecomplicated. A lot of forms can contain a causative concept in them. Thus markedverbs can be seen in Chinese caused-motion construction with proper VP inaccordance with them to represent the moving part of the construction. |
PDF Full Text Request