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Orientation: Unselectiveness of Subject and ObjectIn Mandarin Chinese
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Orientation: Unselectiveness of Subject and Object In Mandarin Chinese In this paper, I attempt to argue that Lin Tzong-Hong¡¯s proposal on unselectiveness of subjects and objects in Mandarin Chinese and the theory of phrase structure is inadequate, in light of Minimalist Program, and expect to arrive at a neater and more unified explanation. Cross-linguistically, the canonical theta-role of subjects of verbs is agent and that of objects is patient. However, very often we see non-agent nominals take a subject position and non-patient nominals take the position of objects, namely, ¡®the unselectiveness of subject and object¡¯ titled by Lin, which is very noticeable in Mandarin Chinese. For instance: (1) Unselectiveness of subject in Mandarin Chinese a. Laozhang kai-le yi-liang tanke-che. (Agentive) p.n. drive-Perf one-Cl tank 'Laozhang drove a tank.' b. Gaosu-gonglu-shang kai-zhe yi-pai tanke-che. (Existential) expressway-on drive-Dur one-line tank 'There is a line of tanks on the expressway.' c. Zhe-liang po-che kai-de wo xia-si le. (Causative) this-Cl broken-car drive-Ext I scare-dead Prt 'Driving this broken car made me scared to death.' (2) Unselectiveness of object in Mandarin Chinese a. chi niu-rou mian (Theme/patient) eat beef noodle 'eat beef noodle' b. chi da-wan (Instrument) eat big-bowl 'use a big bowl to eat' c. chi guanzi (Location) eat restaurant 'dine at some restaurant' d. chi tou-tong (Reason) eat head-ache 'eat for [curing] headache' To account for this phenomenon in UG, Lin turns to event structure which is very much semantic in nature. He puts such great emphasis on the event structures of verbs that he even claims that event structures determine the syntactic structure, not the vice versa. He bases his argument on the fact that inchoatives in English are quite restricted -- though some verbs undergo inchoative- causative alternation quite freely, some others do not, for example, (3) a. *John broke the window. b. *The window broke. c. *The pigs splashed mud on the wall. d. *Mud splashed on the wall. (4) a. *John put a book on the table. b. *The book put on the table. c. *We smeared mud on the wall. d. *Mud smeared on the wall. The problem is that there is an unexpected asymmetry between the ¡®break, splash¡¯ kind of verb and ¡®put, smear¡¯ kind of verb in that the former group of verbs exhibits transitivity alternation while the latter does not. He suggests that the eventuality predicate, which is CAUSE in this case, is a necessary element in the lexical specification of the smear type of verbs, but not for the splash type of verbs. It is nothing other than the event structure that leads to the difference between the two group verbs. Therefore, he assumes that event structures correlate with syntactic structures in a determinant way.
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