A conflation account of mono-clausal resultatives in English and Chinese

• Main Authors: SteveMulkeen, 史帝夫
• Other Authors: Hui-Chi Lee
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/46282384726241356991

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系碩博士班 === 99 === Resultative sentences are of theoretical interest as they are sentences in which more than one sub-event is expressed by a single verb. Syntactic accounts of resultatives depend on a crucial restriction, the Direct Object Restriction, which allows the semantics to decode which argument the resultative phrase is predicated of. The explanatory power of this restriction has been called into question, however, due to the existence of subject-predicated resultatives. This thesis hopes to show that the restriction remains valid by advancing a syntactic account of resultatives based on conflation. Under the account, lexical verbs conflate in syntax to semantics-bearing light verb heads in a V1 slot via an available V2. The account employs small clauses (Hoekstra, 1988, 1992) and l-syntactic structures (Hale ＆ Keyser, 1998) to analyze resultative sentences in English and Chinese. Two basic configurations emerge: the “unaccusative” configuration and the “causative” configuration. The first is a control structure, in which a [P-AGENT] in Spec-SC is raised to sentential subject position after merger of the verb, from where it controls its trace. This configuration is unaccusative. The second is an ECM (Exceptional Case Marking) configuration, in which a nonsubcategorized [P-PATIENT] functions as an unselected verbal complement of an activity verb. This configuration is unergative. The trigger as to the configuration with which the small clause will merge is argued to be the θ-role of the argument in Spec-SC. Subject-predicated sentences are assimilated to the unaccusative configuration as the object NP is not a true object, but a path-denoting NP which, together with the verb, forms a complex predicate. Object-taking resultatives, including “transitives” and those with “fake” reflexives, are assimilated across the board to the causative configuration. Chinese compound verbs appear in either configuration, and, unlike English, these verbs permit semantically-inappropriate specifiers, suggesting that their heads are actually √roots. The event semantics of a Chinese resultative is argued to be derived structurally. The conflation account is able to preserve several constraints considered desirable under a syntactic account, including the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Burzio, 1986; Perlmutter, 1978) and the θ-criterion (Chomsky, 1981).