Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006.

published_or_final_version / Speech and Hearing Sciences / Master / Master of Science in Audiology

 This thesis focuses on a special type of construction in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese long discussed in the literature, namely resultative constructions. The interest of the study lies in the fact that resultative constructions involve an interesting mismatch phenomenon of the mapping of grammatical functions and semantic roles. Since grammatical functions and semantic roles are the building blocks of syntax and semantics, the mapping between grammatical functions and semantic roles is considered a manifestation of the syntactic and semantic interface and it is believed that the study of the mapping between them will shed light on the form and meaning association found inhuman language. However, while an adequate mapping theory can reflect how human experience or meaning is expressed in language, the mapping between grammatical functions and semantic roles is neither linear nor mutually correspondent on a one-to-one basis, rendering the nature of its mechanism obscure. In this thesis, the interface between the semantic and syntactic realizations of resultative constructions in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese will be investigated. The goal is to seek an optimal approach which can provide a more satisfactory account in handling mapping of Mandarin and Cantonese resultatives and explaining the special properties of the V-V structures involved in Mandarin and Cantonese resultative constructions. Drawing from the insights of previous accounts and the properties of resultative constructions, a working definition for resultatives is proposed. Through reviewing some current mapping accounts and revealing their inadequacies and limitations in handling grammatical functions and semantic roles mapping in resultative constructions in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese, I am going to argue that Jackendoff’s (1990) conceptual semantics approach provides an optimal structure for the representation of resultative compounds in particular and the resultative constructions in general in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese. I also want to argue that the investigation of the resultative constructions in Mandarin and Cantonese not only sheds light on the prospect of applying Jackendoff’s (1990) conceptual semantics approach to understanding other types of constructions and special phenomena in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese, but also indicates a new direction of study in the possible multiple sense involved in Mandarin and Cantonese compounds. / published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Philosophy

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published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

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Thesis (M.S.L.T.)--University of Canterbury, 2007. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 63-71). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1986. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-124).

The Mandarin potential complement construction is a language specific structure. This is different from most of the languages in the world including English where modal notions are expressed by modal verbs and auxiliaries. It is a syntactic construction used to convey potential possibility in Mandarin and Cantonese. The various behaviors of the modal expressions in these three languag，i.e., English, Cantonese and Mandarin, raise interesting questions in second language acquisition research. The present study aims to explore how Cantonese speaking learners and English speaking learners process the Mandarin potential complement construction. Acceptability judgment test and corpus study were conducted to examine typical learning difficulties and essential acqu isition patterns in the course of acquiring the Mandarin potential complement construction. Given that the Mandarin potential complement construction is less marked than the Cantonese counterpart but more marked than English modal expressions, I hypothesized that Cantonese speaking learners wou ld have more native-like performance than English speaking learners. Surprisingly, this hypothesis was not completely confirmed in the present study. I will spell out the subjects, performance from the perspectives of language transfer theory, markedness theory and subset principle theory.