Events Construing And Resultative Object Constructions In Mandarin Chinese

This dissertation studies the resultative object constructions in Mandarin Chinese from the perspective of event construing within the frameworks of cognitive semantics and lexical semantics.The resultative object constructions in Mandarin are classified into two major groups:the simple resultative object constructions and the complex resultative object constructions.Simple resultative object constructions are rendered as a "V+N" structure on the syntactic surface,the main verbs of the expressions feature "accomplishment" in their temporal meaning in the sense of Vendler's(1957) quartation,and the constructions as a whole denote "accomplishment" events as well.The simple resultative object constructions are cross-linguistically available and thus are regarded as a language universal(Levin 1999).The complex resultative object constructions in Mandarin comprise two types in form:"V+成cheng/出chu+N" and "V+Classifier+N." Semantically the main verbs in the complex resultative object constructions express either "activity",or "achievement",or "state" in Vendler's(1957) system, and the whole constructions render "accomplishment" events.In cognition,the complex resultative object constructions represent a semantic blending of two causally related simple events.They are realized as a grammatical integration on the language surface.These properties are specific for a language like Chinese as they are not observed in languages like English or Spanish.Certain simple resultative object expressions in Mandarin demonstrate a synonymic relationship to non- resultative "V+N" expressions in the sense that they are conventionally understood as referring to the same events,such as洗照片xi zhaopian "develop photos" and洗胶卷xi jiaojuan "develop the film." This is an effect of prototypical cognition triggered by the specific types of verbs used in the expressions that conventionally suggest unique results of the actions denoted by the verbs.In certain resultative object expressions,descriptive phrases can appear as either the adverbial of the main verb or the modifier to the noun object without changing the referential meaning of the expressions,such as in热热de沏了一壶茶rerede qile yihucha and沏了一壶热热de茶qile yihu rerede cha("brewed a hot pot of tea").The difference in the word ordering of the expressions is a reflection of different deployment of the speaker's perspective in construing the events.