A Contrastive Study On English And Chinese Ergative Constructions From The Perspective Of Typology

Ergativity was first put forward by typologists,such as Dixon(1979,1994)and Comrie(1989),in order to study language types.With more and more studies on it,studies of language type and ergative verbs obtain more attention.The contrastive studies between English and Chinese ergative verbs are discussed more.Therefore,this study focuses on English and Chinese ergative constructions with verbs of change of psychological state and tries to discuss their similarities and differences from the perspective of typology.5 ergative verbs describing the change of psychological sate in English with the highest frequencies are selected from the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA),which are “worry”,“tire”,“cheer”,“thrill” and “delight”,and 5 Chinese ones with the highest frequencies are in the corpus of modern Chinese National Language Committee,which are “dongyao(?:)”,“gandong(??)”,“zhenfen(??)”,“zhendong(??)” and “weiqu(??)”.They are studied and compared with the theoretical framework of the animacy hierarchy and event structure,which may provide some rules for English and Chinese ergative constructions and make some contribution in second language acquisition.This thesis tries to answer the following questions:1)What are the distributions of the two patterns(“A + V + O” and “S + V”)in English or Chinese verb ergative constructions?2)How does animacy hierarchy of A and O/S influence the alternation of the two patterns of English and Chinese ergative construction? What similarities and differences are displayed in them?3)How does semantic meaning of ergative verbs influence the alternation of two patterns of English and Chinese ergative constructions? What similarities and differences are displayed in them?After analyzing and discussing the data,conclusions are drawn as follows:First,the distributions of the two patterns of English and Chinese ergative constructions are not much different from each other.For the most of verbs,the frequencies of the pattern “S + V” are a bit higher than that of “A + V + O”.However,some verbs like “delight” and “zhendong(??)” are used more often in “A + V + O” than in “S + V”.Second,considering the animacy hierarchy of A,O and S,those participants in constructions at the left-hand of animacy hierarchy are more likely to be agents which are in the O/S function while those at the right-hand are mostly likely to be patients in the A function.To be more specific,if the first,second,third-person pronouns,proper names and human common nouns are in the O/S function,English and Chinese ergative constructions will be likely to be in the pattern “S + V”.Meanwhile,inanimative common nouns and nonhuman animaitve can also be in the O/S function in Chinese,which will make Chinese ergative constructions into the pattern “A + V + O”.However,some verbs like “worry”,“delight” and “gandong(??)” will have some other features in practical use.Finally,English and Chinese ergative constructions have similar features concerning the aspect of event structure.If the event structure is of activities,accomplishments and achievements,then the pattern “A + V + O” will be used more.While the event structure is of states,then the pattern “S + V” is the preferred pattern.