A Study On The Syntax And Semantics Of Chinese Ergative Construction

This thesis analyzes the syntactical and semantic characteristics of Chinese ergative construction within the framework of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program. It mainly introduces the constrains and the derivational mechanism of Chinese ergative construction and explores the same points and different points between Chinese and English ergative construction tentatively. The derivational process of Chinese ergative construction is composed of three steps of movement. Firstly, the ergative verb in the lower level is attracted by the light verb with strong morpheme and merges with the light verb. Then the deep object moves upward from the position of internal argument to the position of Spec-vP in order to get Case. At last, the NP moves upward to the position of Spec-T to satisfy the EPP feature of Chinese. Syntactically, Chinese ergative construction owns the features of NP movement and tense mark. As the object in deep construction can not get Case in its original position, it has to be moved to the position of Spec-T. At the same time, ergative verbs in Chinese ergative construction are attached with an affixational morpheme “le” or “guo”, these two affixational morphemes are markers of past tense and perfect tense. Semantically,Chinese ergative construction shows the change-of-state of the grammatical subject of the construction and the event the construction described has the feature of telicity and specialty.Based on the former studies on ergative constructions, this thesis explores the same aspects and different aspects between Chinese and English ergative constructions, and tries to explain them within the framework of Minimalist Program.Chinese ergative constructions and English ergative constructions have the same derivational process and the two derivational processes both experience three steps of movements. Meanwhile, Chinese and English ergative constructions also have some similarities in semantics. However, because of the strong EPP feature of Chinese, the NP in the intransitive ergative construction could appear either before or after the verb,but the NP could only appear before the verb in English. What’s more, the total number of ergative verbs with simple morpheme in English is larger than the totalamount of those in Chinese. In addition, Chinese lacks morphological change, some affixes are added to the verb to indicate the aspect of the sentence. Though some differences do exist between Chinese and English ergative constructions, the basic feature of them are similar. We hope this thesis could help people understand Chinese ergative constructions better.