Locative Verbs And Their Argument Structure Alternations In English And Chinese: A Contrastive Study

Human beings live in a spatial world. Figure frame and Ground frame are two structures in language that people use to describe motion in space. The description of motion involves locative verbs. This dissertation examines English and Chinese locative verbs and their two argument structure alternations (locative alternation and the causative alternation) within the framework of some of the lexical-semantic theories as proposed by Rappaport Hovav and Levin (1988), Pinker (1989), Levin (1993), Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995, 1998, 2003). Contrastive analysis is employed and data are collected from monolingual Chinese dictionaries and bilingual English-Chinese dictionaries.The lexical-semantic representation approaches take the view that verbs can be classified according to their syntactic behavior, namely, argument alternations or diathesis alternations, resulting in"syntactically relevant semantically coherent classes of verbs"(Levin 1993). There is a strong correlation between semantic facets of a verb and its syntactic expressions. Based on the previous notions and classifications of locative verbs, I define a locative verb as a verb which effects a change in the location of an entity (= argument), or a verb which describes an entity that changes by itself in its location, or a verb which causes an entity to change its state by virtue of another entity to undergo a change in location, along a Path, to a Goal or away from a Source. Accordingly I propose a licensing condition for determining Chinese locative verbs. After making a small comparison between English and Chinese locative verbs, I find that English is more highly lexicalized in locative verbs than Chinese.Argument structure alternations are cross-linguistic phenomena, but the way they are realized and the form they take may vary with languages. The locative alternation which involves locative verbs takes places where location arguments can alternate with locatum arguments and thus become realized as the direct object, giving rise to pairs of near-synonymous sentences. But not all locative verbs can participate in the locative alternation, with some appearing only in one of the two sentences, namely, either the locative variant (Figure frame) or the with variant (Ground frame). According to Pinker, only locative verbs with both PATH and STATE meaning components can participate in the locative alternation. Juffs (1993, 1996) made a detailed study of the Chinese locative alternation. This dissertation puts his Chinese argument structures of Figure frame and Ground frame to test again and find that the Figure frames he provides work well but his Ground frames have a low acceptability. And this verifies his claim that, though accepted by the Chinese in Canada, these Ground frames are not welcomed by monolingual Chinese speakers in mainland China. Therefore I propose a Ground frame which is entirely consistent with the English Ground frame in terms of change of state and total affectedness. And the result of the test of this proposed Ground frame shows that it receives a much higher acceptability than Juffs's three Ground frames. This proposed Ground frame conforms to lexical-semantic assumption that in the locative alternation one variant is derived from the other and that the with variant entails the locative variant. On the basis of Juffs's Figure frames and my proposed Ground frame, following Pinker's Broad Conflation classes and Narrow Conflation Classes, I make comparisons between English and Chinese locative verbs. Result shows that with respect to the locative alternation Chinese locative verbs do not all follow Pinker's classifications. Alternating Chinese content-oriented verbs can alternate in the same way as their English counterparts do. But unlike their English counterparts, part of the so-called non alternating Chinese content-oriented verbs can also alternate if they are put into the proposed Ground frame. Like their English counterparts, most of the so-called alternating Chinese container-oriented verbs can alternate but they exhibit characteristics of alternating Chinese content-oriented verbs and therefore should be considered to be part of the alternating content-oriented verbs. A small proportion of the non alternating Chinese container-oriented verbs could belong to non alternating Chinese content-oriented verbs while the others do not alternate and they are intrinsically container-oriented. These findings to a great extent confirm Kim and Landau's (1997) assumption that Chinese, like Korean and Japanese, is a Figure prominent language.Besides, the causative alternation is also researched in this dissertation because a lot of locative verbs participate in this alternation. The causative alternation is an alternation which takes place between a transitive variant and an intransitive variant, where"the transitive use of a verb V can be paraphrased as roughly'cause to V-intransitive'"(Levin 1993). The causative alternation is a cover term which contains several subtypes of alternation, of which two subtypes: causative/inchoative alternation involving break verbs and roll verbs and induced action alternation involving run (gallop) verbs are investigated. Concerning the realization of the causative alternation there are two leading approaches: causativization advocated by Dowty (1979), Parsons (1990) and decausativization as advanced by Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995). A comparison of the break verbs between English and Chinese shows that, like English, there also exists lexical causative alternation in Chinese with Chinese break type verbs, namely, the causative alternation realized through lexical operation without any morphological change. It is also found through comparisons of the Chinese roll verbs and run verbs with their English counterparts that, unlike English, the Chinese causative alternation involving these locative verbs is realized mostly by means of periphrastic (analytic) causative operation rather than lexical causative operation because these verbs take only the intransitive forms and there are no corresponding transitive verbs in Chinese.The first comparison shows that decausativization could be used to account for the Chinese lexical causative alternation if the unaccusativity theory is followed. The second and third comparisons prove that it is the causativization that works upon the realization of the causative alternation. These results could be further evidence, as more people hold now, that both causativization and decausativization play a role in the realization of the causative alternation.The investigation of Chinese locative verbs and their two argument structure alternations is just preliminary one and it is hoped that some light will be shed on further studies. More of"terra incognito"about Chinese argument structure alternations remains to be explored.