A Study On Unaccusativity Of Existential Verbs In English And Chinese

According to Unaccusativity Hypothesis, which is formulated within the context of relation grammar, intransitive verbs in traditional sense can be further divided into unaccusative verbs and unergative verbs. Although both of the two types has only one argument respectively, which always appear in front of verb acting as subject in surface structure, their deep structure and logical semantic relations differ greatly. The subject of unaccusative verb in surface structure is in fact the original object in deep structure which moved to the subject position later, while the subject of unergative verb in surface structure is just the original subject in deep structure. Thus, it’s obvious that existential verb belongs to unaccusative verb for it has only one internal argument. Additionally, the passivized transitive verb can also be regarded as an unaccusative verb for it has only an internal argument.This thesis mainly discusses case assignment of unaccusative verb in both English and Chinese existential construction, especially the syntactic nature of retained object in Chinese.In Chapter1, I will review some relevant theories within the framework of generative grammar especially adopting the minimalist approach, providing relevant and necessary theoretical backgrounds for the analysis of the unaccusativity of existential verbs in Chapter2and Chapter3including philosophy premise of transformational grammar, thematic role theory, case theory, argument structure and relevant syntactic operations such as merge and agreement, feature checking, etc.Chapter2is to discuss existential construction and unaccusativity hypothesis in detail. The basic forms of existential sentence in English are there-construction and locative inversion construction; those in Chinese are locative inversion construction and absolute existential construction with transitive verb like you (to have). Definiteness effect in existential construction results from insufficient observation. The event structure of the existential construction is related to unaccusativity hypothesis to some extent, but there is no perfect explanation for its syntactic operation and case assignment. The syntactic nature of unaccusative verbs is also discussed in detail in this chapter with a proposal that unaccusative verbs should be diagnosed synthetically in language.Chapter3is to deal with retained object in Chinese. With a full observation on retained objects, we provide an analysis on merits and demerits of existing programs. I accept movement hypothesis and hold that the two [DPs] before the operation of movement forms a small clause, of which case assignment has been done before the movement, for its structure stability and spelling in PF. Since the two [DPs] are at the same syntactic level, construction becomes unstable. Meanwhile, the existence of two [DPs] at the same level violates identification principle. Therefore, they cannot be spelt out at PF level. Compared with other programs, this one is more powerful in explanation and generalization and convincingly explains why the [DP], as subject in small clause, cannot be moved.