On The Syntactic Analysis Of Chinese ES And EO Psych Verbs

Psych verbs have attracted linguist's attention both at home and abroad due to their peculiar semantic and syntactic properties. This thesis attempts to investigate Chinese psych verbs from a semantic and syntactic perspective.Chinese psych verbs can be divided into two types:ES (Experiencer Subject) type and EO (Experiencer Object) type. To have a better observation of semantic and syntactic properties of Chinese psych verbs, I raised the following research questions: First, how to classify Chinese ES and EO psych verbs? Second, what are the syntactic properties of Chinese ES and EO psych verbs? Third, what is the relation between Chinese psych verbs and applicative construction or scope interpretation?As for the first question, according to Huang (2007)'s classification of verbs from the perspective of light verbs and lexical decomposition, we classify ES psych verbs as unergative type and EO psych verbs as unaccusative type. As for the second question, according to the classification of psych verbs, we observe that EO psych verbs select Causer and Experiencer as its argument, while ES psych verbs select Experiencer and Theme as its argument. We also conduct some tests, but EO and ES psych verbs show opposite syntactic properties through the tests. As for the third question, we argue that objects introduced by preposition 'dui'of ES psych verbs are due to the presence of an applicative projection. According to thematic hierarchy, we observe that ES and EO psych verbs hold the same understanding of inverse scope.Based on the above discussion, this thesis analyzes syntactic and semantic properties of psych verbs in Mandarin Chinese. We argue that two classes of psych verbs have opposite syntactic properties, which is due to different argument structure.