A Study Of Chinese Verb-locative Constructions

Despite a large number of related researches on the study of Chinese verb-locative constructions,controversies still remain about it.Many scholars have pointed out that verb-locative constructions are transformed by prepositional structures,which undergoes two generative mechanisms:direct generation and transformational generation.Locative object in the structures is viewed as substitute object,which belongs to unconventional object and is available for asking questions with "zheer or naer".Nevertheless,the conclusion mainly concentrates on specific types of verb-locative constructions.Besides,explanations about the generation reasons and semantic characteristics of the structures are pretty vague,which needs to be further studied.Combining with relevant linguistic theories of vP shell,the thesis adopts Chinese verb-locative constructions as research objectives and key analyses are conducted over the structures so as to explore its semantic characteristics,syntactic structure and formation reasons.On the basis of light verb theory at home and abroad,the author supports the idea that light verb is event predicate.Syntactic structures of any transitive verbs are vP shell,where light verb is the head and verb phrase is the complement.For further probing into Chinese verb-locative constructions,two specific research questions are presented:1)What ingredients can act as locative object?Why can they act?2)What are the semantic characteristics of verb-locative constructions?How are syntactic structures expressed in the structures?In view of two questions above and abundant corpus analyses,the explanations are drawn as follows in this thesis:1)It is found that there are three components that can constitute locative objects:direction words,locative words or locative word +direction words,common nouns + direction words.2)The generation reasons about verb-locative constructions are the co-effect of semantics and pragmatics.The prominence of locative case and economical principle are significant formation factors.3)Syntactically,verb-locative constructions belong to vP shell.There are two light verbs in the deep structures:DO and EXIST.Locative objects are the specifier of verb phrases.Verbs are moved into the head of vP shell to get the surface structure.Semantically,there are five typical semantic types in verb-locative constructions:location,source,path,direction,goal.The study delves into Chinese verb-locative constructions as a whole,which sheds light on the research about related sentence patterns which contain the structures.