A Study Of The Syntax-semantics Interface Of Fugitive Verbs In English And Chinese

The existential sentence is a sentence pattern commonly used in English and Chinese. In English, it is represented by the there-be structure which includes the relatively low-productive English fugitive sentence(abbreviated EFS). In Chinese, the existential sentence encompasses two subordinate sentence patterns, namely the cunzai sentence and the fugitive sentence. Besides, EFS is comparatively low-productive and vague in its definition, and it is classified as a special variant of there-be structure by scholars abroad. Compared with EFS,scholars at home have made abundant achievements in the researches on existential sentences and cunxian sentences in Chinese, nevertheless the researches on Chinese fugitive sentences(abbreviated CFS) have long been dependent on those of existential sentences and CFS still comes short of specific and pertinent investigation.Therefore, it can be found that the specific researches on EFS and CFS are all quite limited, especially the contrastive study between the two counterparts. This study aims to contrast and investigate the coercive and mapping relationships between the semantics and syntax of English fugitive verbs(abbreviated EFV) and Chinese fugitive verbs(abbreviated CFV) from the theoretical perspectives of the lexical coercion and the construction coercion based on the Theory of Syntax-Semantics Interface, with the aim to reveal the disparities as well as similarities of EFV and CFV and to enrich the present researches on the contrastive study between EFS and CFS.Regarding theories applied,this thesis focuses on the Theory of Syntax-Semantics Interface(abbreviated SSI)which can be generally divided into Projectionist Theory and Construction Grammar. Projectionist Theory holds that the semantic meaning of predicate verbs can predict its syntactical realization, which indicates that semantics is determinative of the syntax of the predicate verb. On the contrary, Construction Grammar holds that the syntax-related meaning comes from the construction which enables verbs to produce different sentence patterns,which indicates that syntax is determinative of the semantic meaning of the predicate verb. As we see, these two theories are virtually two different research perspectives of SSI, and they both relate to the lexical coercion and the construction coercion. Specifically, Projectionist Theory emphasizes the lexical coercion while Construction Grammar stresses the construction coercion. The meaning of a sentence should be the interactive result of both lexical meaning and construction meaning, namely the output of both lexical coercion and construction coercion.The two factors of lexicon and construction should be taken into account. Therefore, only through an integrated investigation of both the two aspects, can we reasonably clarify the SSI issue of EFV and CFV.With respect of the framework, this thesis consists of six chapters. As the introductory section, Chapter One opens with an overall glimpse of the whole thesis, presenting the outline and major questions to be looked into.Chapter Two makes a literature review of the relevant research at home and abroad about EFS and CFS, and discusses their definition, classification and fugitive verbs respectively. It should be pointed out that the fugitive verbs in this thesis refer to the kind of verbs which indicate the meaning of appearance or disappearance and are capable to enter the fugitive construction, like emerge, occur, develop, ensue in EFVs, and shǎn(闪, flash)、mào(�', raise and appear)、xiǎng(响, ring)、yì(溢, overflow) in CFVs. What the fugitive sentence refers to here is the sentence pattern signifying that certain object or somebody appears or disappears at certain place or in certain time.Chapter Three introduces relevant theories about SSI and clarifies the theoretical framework of this thesis. Chapter Four brings in three concepts about fugitive verbs, viz. semantic load, productiveness and qualified EFS to total results ratio, based on detailed corpus-based investigations. Furthermore, the disparities between EFV and CFV in terms of the relationship among these three concepts are detailedly discussed in this chapter which will lead to the research in Chapter Five. Chapter Five deliberately analyzes the different SSI issues of EFV and CFV and puts forward the research findings of this thesis. Chapter Six is the conclusion of the whole thesis and points out the development direction of relevant further study. Through the contrastive study, we have achieved the following research findings.Firstly, English fugitive construction(abbreviated EFC) and Chinese fugitive construction(abbreviated CFC)contain the same construction meaning, i.e., certain object or somebody appears or disappears at certain place or in certain time, nevertheless they feature different syntactical structures since EFC is syntactically represented as“There+V+NP+(PPlocation)” while CFC as “PPlocation+V+NP”.Secondly, there exists the coercive relationship between the semantics and syntax of both EFV and CFV, but their situations are different. On the one hand, EFVs are nearly all typical ones with apparent fugitive meaning.EFV and EFC both work on each other to intensify the fugitive meaning of EFS, thus they are a pair of relations featuring mutual coercion. That is to say, the meaning of EFV and the meaning of EFC are complementary with each other so as to strengthen the fugitive meaning of EFS. The three components of EFC, namely the expletive there, the EFV and the PPlocation, all semantically and syntactically strengthen the fugitive meaning of EFC.Meanwhile, EFC also exerts semantic coercion towards EFV in three ways: EFC refuses the entrance of verbs indicating disappearance, the verbs of ambiguous meaning and the collocational usage of “EFV+PP”. On the other hand, CFV can be divided into typical ones, ordinary ones and atypical ones. Typical CFVs play a major role in shaping the syntactical structure of CFS, given that they possess obvious fugitive meaning which syntactically works on the syntactical arguments of location and appearer, especially under the triggering effect of the tendency verbs behind CFV. When the CF structure develops into a more complex and fixed construction, it takes effect on CFV in return, which is quite obvious on atypical CFVs that are endowed with the fugitive meaning only after they enter the CF construction.Thirdly, the relationship among the productiveness, semantic load and qualified EFS to total results ratio of EFV and CFV is differential. As for EFV, only the ratio probably relates to the semantic load of an EFV in apositive way but there is no reliable positive correlation between productiveness and the other two factors. On the contrary, there exists a positive correlation among the three factors of CFV. This disparity further proves that EFV and CFV differ in the feature of their verbal group and they also distinguish from each other on SSI issues.