| A number of studies have shown that there are obvious internal differences in traditional intransitive verbs. In order to explain the differences, Perlmutter (1978) put forward the famous Unaccusative Hypothesis. Since then, linguists have made a lot of research on unaccusative verbs and unaccusativity has become a hot topic in linguistic research. Some scholars (Burzio1986; Belletti1988; Levin and Rappaport1995,2005; Alexiadou2004; Huang1997,2007; Shen and Sybesma2012, among others) have classified the unaccusative verb and put forward corresponding means of diagnostics according to different languages, but these studies have some problems in both syntax and semantics. Based on the previous studies, a modified definition of unaccusative verb is proposed. In this thesis, we give a detailed analysis of the four Chinese eventualities:state, achievement, accomplishment and activity and we find that Chinese unccusative verbs belong to the achievement type which denotes a change of state. Based on this characteristic, the thesis tries to put forward a diagnostic for Chinese unaccusative verb:unaccusative verbs can appear in locative inversion construction and co-occur only with the aspect marker le. It is shown that this diagnostic of unaccusativity is not only useful to test the unaccusativity in Chinese but also effective to explain some controversial Chinese unaccusative verbs, which further explains the generative mechanism of the Chinese unaccusative verbs and validates the correctness of Unaccusative Hypothesis, and hence reveals the nature of human language. |
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