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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

The syntax of V-V resultatives in Mandarin Chinese

Liu, Jianxun 25 January 2019 (has links)
This is a study on the syntax of V-V resultative constructions in Mandarin Chinese within the generative framework. I investigate three aspects of these constructions: the generation of resultative V-V compounds, the syntactic structure of V-V resultatives, and their alternation properties. First, I investigate in which component of grammar and with what mechanisms resultative V-V compounds are generated. With regard to the generation of complex words, Marantz (2000) proposes that words are generated in two different syntactic domains, the inner domain of a lexical root and the outer domain, and words thus generated demonstrate different properties. Adopting this proposal, I propose a syntactic analysis of the generation of resultative V-V compounds. One observation of this study is that V-V resultative compounds and another type of V-V compounds in Mandarin Chinese, parallel V-V compounds, while seemingly similar, possess systematically different properties. Based on this observation, I argue that resultative V-V compounds are formed in the outer domain, by combining two categorized verbs (vP1 and vP2), while parallel V-V compounds are formed in the inner domain, in which the two acategorical lexical roots (√1 and √2) combine first to form a root complex, which then merges with little v. Second, I explore an event-mapping approach to the syntactic structure of V-V resultatives. Regarding the syntactic representation of the semantic event structures, the isomorphism hypothesis (e.g., Lin, 2004; Ramchand, 2008) postulates that there is a transparent correspondence between semantic subevents and the syntactic element of vPs. Particularly, Lin’s (2004) isomorphism analysis argues that two types of V-V resultative constructions, object-oriented and subject-oriented V-V resultatives, have the same event structure, and therefore have the same syntactic structure, in which three vPs represent three subevents. In the present study, based on the adverbial modification properties, I argue that an isomorphism analysis of Mandarin V-V resultatives does not hold, and that the two types of V-V resultatives have different syntactic structures. To be more specific, while the syntactic structure of object-oriented V-V resultatives contains two vPs, a vCAUSEP that takes as its complement a vBECOMEP, the syntactic structure of subject-oriented V-V resultatives contains a single vBECOMEP. This analysis reveals that, while object-oriented V-V resultatives are causative constructions, subject-oriented V-V resultatives are inchoative unaccusative predicates, despite the ‘cause-result’ meaning they convey. Finally, based on the analysis that object-oriented and subject-oriented V-V resultatives have different syntactic structures, I account for their alternation properties. I propose that the alternative uses of these two types of V-V resultatives fall into two different categorizations: decausativization (of object-oriented resultatives) and causativization (of subject-oriented resultatives). I then argue that (most of) the properties of the alternative uses of V-V resultatives have two sources: the distinctive semantic and syntactic properties of subject-oriented resultatives, and the Direct Causation Condition on the subject in causatives. / Graduate

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