The Syntax of Event Structure in Chinese

294 Pages·2016·2.53 MB·English

by  Chang Jung-hsing.

THE SYNTAX OF EVENT STRUCTURE IN CHINESE

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI’I IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

IN

LINGUISTICS

MAY 2001

By

Jung-hsing Chang

Dissertation Committee:

William O’Grady, Chairperson
Byron W. Bender
Yi-Leng Chen
Roderick A. Jacobs
Ying-che Li
ii

We certify that we have read this dissertation and that, in our opinion, it is
satisfactory in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor
of Philosophy in Linguistics.

DISSERTATION COMMITTEE

__________________________
Chairperson

__________________________

__________________________

__________________________

__________________________
iii

© Copyright 2001
by
Jung-hsing Chang
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My debts of gratitude and appreciation are deep and many. First of all, I would
like to thank my distinguished advisor, William O'Grady, for his insightful comments on
the earlier drafts of this dissertation and his constant guidance and encouragement
throughout the years. I would also like to thank Ying-che Li for providing me with
detailed page-by-page comments on the entire manuscript. I own my gratitude to
Roderick A. Jacobs for his kind help at various stages of my study. His scholarly
expertise in cognitive linguistics has always been a great inspiration to me. My debt is
also to two other committee members for their suggestions, information, and help of
other sorts; they are Byron W. Bender and Yi-Leng Chen.
My thanks also go to Hsiu-Chuan Liao, Cheng-chi Chu, and Kazumi Yoshihara,
who provided me with many important comments on the entire prefinal manuscript.
I would like to gratefully acknowledge the fellowship provided for this research
by Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation.
My dearest thanks, finally, go to my parents for their support over the years of my
study in Hawaii, and to my wife, Hui-hua Hwang, and my son, Chao-wei Chang, for a
variety of forms of assistance and the happiness they have given to me.
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ABSTRACT
Based on the idea that event structure plays an important role in linguistic analysis,
this dissertation focuses on three main issues. The first issue is concerned with the
intertwined relationships among eventuality types in both English and Chinese, their
syntactic distributions, and semantic interpretations associated with almost-adverbials, in-
adverbials, and for-adverbials. The contrasts between eventuality types are accounted for
in terms of two principles: Event Projection and Event-component Fusion.
The second issue is concerned with the development of Chinese resultative verb
constructions and its close relationship with other syntactic constructions such as the Ba-
construction, the Bei-construction, and the Verb-copying construction. It is suggested
that the development of resultative verb constructions results from semantic factors rather
than word order change from SVO to SOV. In addition, the contrasts of resultative verb
constructions, serial verb constructions, and directional verb constructions in terms of
whether the two verbs can occur adjacently are conceived of as an iconic reflection of
event structure.
The last issue is concerned with the linking of arguments to syntax in Chinese
resultative verb constructions. It is demonstrated that the linking principles based on the
event roles are able to account for the complementary distribution of the Ba-construction
and the Verb-copying construction, because 'ba+NP' is associated only with the Locus of
affect role (an entity that is involved in the endpoint), whereas 'a copied verb+NP' is
associated only with the Target of activity role (an entity that undergoes the action). It is
predicted that a resultative verb construction, which can occur in the Ba-construction, can
have a corresponding Bei-construction, because both constructions involve the
displacement of the Locus of affect role.
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LIST OF TABLES
Table Page
2.1 The syntactic properties of the four eventuality classes......................................44
2.2 The semantic properties of the four eventuality classes......................................45
3.1 Aspectual properties of stage-level and individual-level states.........................101
3.2 Linguistic properties of activity eventualities in Chinese..................................108
3.3 Linguistic properties of state eventualities in Chinese......................................111
3.4 Syntactic properties of RVCs in English and Chinese.......................................133
3.5 Adverbial interpretations of English and Chinese RVCs..................................139
4.1 Linguistic properties of RVCs, SVCs, and DVCs.............................................170
5.1 Different types of RVCs and syntactic constructions associated with them.....205
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................iv
ABSTRACT......................................................................................................................v
LIST OF TABLES...........................................................................................................vi
Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION..........................................................................................1
1.1 Introduction.........................................................................................................1
1.2 The background of eventuality...........................................................................3
1.2.1 Eventuality classes.....................................................................................3
1.2.2 Aspectual shift...........................................................................................7
1.2.3 Event structure and argument assignment...............................................10
1.3 The main issues of the dissertation...................................................................15
1.3.1 The historical background of RVCs in Chinese......................................15
1.3.2 RVCs and their relevant syntactic constructions.....................................20
1.3.3 Grammatical contrasts between English and Chinese.............................24
1.4 Organization of the dissertation........................................................................29

Chapter 2 EVENT STRUCTURE IN ENGLISH.........................................................31
2.1 Introduction.......................................................................................................31
2.2 Syntactic properties of eventuality classes.......................................................33
2.2.1 Activities..................................................................................................33
2.2.2 States........................................................................................................35
2.2.3 Achievements...........................................................................................37
2.2.4 Accomplishments.....................................................................................40
2.2.5 Summary..................................................................................................44
2.3 Theoretical framework......................................................................................47
2.3.1 Situational complex of eventuality..........................................................47
2.3.2 Event-component Fusion and Event Projection.......................................51
2.4 An integrated account.......................................................................................59
2.4.1 Syntactic phenomena and Event Projection.............................................59
2.4.2 Interpretations of almost-adverbials........................................................60
2.4.3 Interpretations of temporal adverbials.....................................................67
2.4.3.1 Frame adverbials.............................................................................67
2.4.3.2 Durative adverbials.........................................................................73
2.4.4 Interpretations associated with "keep V-ing"..........................................76
2.5 Concluding remarks..........................................................................................77

Chapter 3 EVENTUALITIES AND GRAMMAR IN CHINESE................................80
3.1 Introduction.......................................................................................................80
3.2 Aspect marker le and its aspectual properties...................................................81
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3.2.1 Le as an aspectual focus marker...............................................................81
3.2.2 Aspect marker le and state eventualities..................................................88
3.2.2.1 Stage-level and individual-level states............................................88
3.2.2.2 Slightly- and almost-adverbial tests................................................92
3.2.2.3 State eventualities and their aspectual properties...........................95
3.2.3 Summary................................................................................................101
3.3 Syntactic properties of different eventualities in Chinese..............................102
3.3.1 Activities................................................................................................102
3.3.2 States......................................................................................................108
3.3.3 Accomplishments...................................................................................111
3.3.4 Achievements.........................................................................................119
3.3.5 Summary................................................................................................121
3.4 Resultative verb constructions in English and Chinese..................................122
3.4.1 Syntactic properties of resultative verb constructions...........................122
3.4.2 A contrastive account.............................................................................133
3.4.2.1 Event Projection and the syntactic properties associated with it..133
3.4.2.2 Interpretations of almost- and in-adverbials.................................134
3.4.3 Interpretations associated with different adverbials..............................137
3.4.4 Summary................................................................................................138
3.5 Concluding remarks........................................................................................139

Chapter 4 THE RELATION OF GRAMMAR TO EVENT STRUCTURE..............142
4.1 Introduction.....................................................................................................142
4.2 Linguistic properties of RVCs, SVCs, and DVCs in Chinese........................151
4.2.1 Grammatical phenomena associated with EP and ECF.........................151
4.2.2 Grammatical phenomena associated with temporal structure...............159
4.2.3 Summary................................................................................................169
4.3 An account for the development of Chinese RVCs........................................171
4.3.1 The relation between form and meaning...............................................171
4.3.2 Grammaticalization of RVCs in Chinese...............................................178
4.3.3 Summary................................................................................................186
4.4 Concluding remarks........................................................................................187

Chapter 5 EVENT STRUCTURE AND ARGUMENT LINKING...........................190
5.1 Introduction.....................................................................................................190
5.2 Chinese RVCs and their relevant syntactic constructions..............................191
5.2.1 Both V and V are intransitive verbs....................................................193
1 2
5.2.2 V is a transitive verb while V is an intransitive verb..........................197
1 2
5.2.3 RVCs with ambiguous interpretations...................................................203
5.2.4 Summary................................................................................................205
5.3 Linking theoretical framework.......................................................................207
5.3.1 Argument linking and thematic roles.....................................................207
5.3.2 Representation of event structure...........................................................213
5.3.3 Event roles.............................................................................................217
5.3.4 Argument linking and RVCs in Chinese...............................................221
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5.3.4.1 Both V and V are intransitives...................................................228
1 2
5.3.4.2 V is a transitive whereas V is an intransitive.............................231
1 2
5.3.4.3 Passivization of RVCs in Chinese................................................237
5.3.4.4 RVCs with ambiguous interpretations..........................................242
5.4 Concluding remarks........................................................................................247

Chapter 6 CONCLUSION...........................................................................................249
REFERENCES.............................................................................................................257