| Change-of-state verbs refer to the verbs which can demonstrate an entity which undergoes a change of state in shape or appearance. Linguists pay much attention to this kind of verbs for their frequent use. Studies have shown that the argument realization and syntactic representation of these verbs appear to be quite distinct from other verbs. In the late 20th century, the rise of Event Structure Theory provided a new perspective to the research into COS verbs. This thesis plans to make a contrastive study based on Rappaport & Levin(1998)’s Event Structure Theory with combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses of the corpus. This paper aims to find out the overall features of the use of "break" COS verbs in English and Chinese.As an empirical research, the author retrieves natural tokens from COCA and CCL to examine the viability of the Event Structure Theory. Furthermore, the author would like to find the differences and similarities by calculating the proportion of each alternation and comparing the syntactic structures of "break" COS verbs in these two languages.This thesis aims to solve the following questions:firstly, what are the overall features of the use of "break" COS verbs in English and Chinese corpus? Do they all participate in causative/inchoative alternation, resultative phrases, middle alternation and instrument subject alternation? Secondly, is the argument realization similar between English and Chinese "break" COS verbs? Why? Thirdly, are there any differences and similarities between "break" COS verbs in English and Chinese?In this thesis, KWIC method would be used to collect the tokens in COCA & CCL online. The author search the tokens and manually exclude the verb phrases and verbs of uncorresponding meaning to examine the use of "break" COS verbs in corpus. The author compares these tokens in terms of causative/inchoative alternation, resultative phrases, middle alternation and instrument subject alternation to investigate into their syntactic representation. The results indicate that the argument realization and syntactic representation of "break" COS verbs selected are basically similar to each other. They all can be explained by Event Structure Theory. Unaccusative phenomenon can be found frequently in the use of "break" COS verbs. In causative/inchoative alternation and instrument alternation, people prefer to use "le" and "ba" in Chinese. The proportion of resultative phrases is low in Chinese compared with English because "break" COS verbs in Chinese always maintain a meaning of the result. The middle alternation in Chinese often appears with "NP+ AP+ V" syntactic structure and "NP+V+AP" in English.There may be some limitations on our research. This thesis just focuses on some of the externally caused "break" COS verbs which is far from exhaustive and may exclude some characteristics. Besides, since Chinese language is so broad and profound, the corresponding verbs may not be that accurate. Therefore further research need to be done to confirm the results.This paper consists of six chapters:In chapter one, the topic of the research is briefly introduced, followed with the significance and objectives of the study. In chapter two, some literature would be reviewed to go through some linguistic concepts and previous studies. Thus, the originality of our thesis would be better illustrated. In chapter three, the theoretical framework—the Event Structure Theory will be introduced in detail, especially Rappaport & Levin (1998)’s Event Structure Theory. In chapter four, the research design is stated including our research questions, data collection and procedure of analysis. Chapter five focuses on our results and discussion based on the analysis of the "break" COS verbs’ behavior in four alternations. Chapter six is the conclusion of the research, together with the implication and limitation of our study and suggestions for future study. |
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