A Syntactic Study Of Monosyllabic Mandarin Chinese Denominal Verbs

Some words in Chinese can be used as both noun and verb,but a syntactic perspective towards this universal issue has been seldom adopted by researchers in previous literature.Intending to explore the syntax of monosyllabic Chinese denominal verbs,this study has inherited the quadripartite classification of the previous studies as state,activity,achievement and accomplishment,determined by their aspect feature [±telic] and [±dynamic],but differs in that it claims that the derived lexical item is derived from the narrow syntax but not the lexicon.Based on the Minimalist Program(Chomsky 2015),this thesis holds that there is no computation system or L-syntax in the lexicon.In this computation system,a nominal root with phonological information from the lexicon merges with a phonologically empty verb head with certain semantic content,specifically,HOLD-Root for state denominal verbs,DO-Root for activity,BECOME-Root for achievement and DO-BECOME-Root for accomplishment.At Spell-out,the root conflates into the light verb head to avoid crashing at PF and is then attracted to the higher functional v head to be spelled out as morphological word,surfacing in the phonological content of the root and an integrated semantic structure of the root and light verb.The root contains the information of potential event participants.Light verbs can select relevant participants for syntactic computation which eventually appear in the surface form.This can explain why denominal verbs of different types have different argument structure as well as the category shift of certain denominal verbs.Accomplishment denominal verbs has an external argument base-generated at the vP specifier position and can be unaccusativized by a covert lexical operation that deletes the light verb DO selecting the external argument.Compared with previous studies of monosyllabic Mandarin Chinese denominal verbs of Cheng(2010a,b,2016),this study is more theoretically economical and universal.First,the structure and process of the syntactic model for denominal verbs is more transparent and simpler.Second,the syntactic model of this thesis is syntactically realistic in the sense that the model can accommodate various syntactic properties of denominal verbs.