| Psych predicates have generally been considered as one of the hot spots and difficult points in linguistics studies because of their special mappings between syntactic positions and thematic roles,while psych adjuncts,derived from psych predicates,also play an important role in linguistic research.Psych adjuncts are non-selective elements in a sentence that describe or modify the actions,events or the psychological states of the participants in the events.They not only have the attributes of adjuncts,but also have the characteristics of predicates.They are adjuncts that play the semantic roles of predicates,and are often called predicate adjuncts.Psych adjuncts in English appear in the initial,middle(before or after the primary predicate)or the final position of a sentence,which correspond to four semantic orientation types: speaker-oriented,agent-oriented,manner-oriented and participant-oriented.They have distinct morphology,including adverb phrases,preposition phrases and adjective forms.We can almost distinguish their semantic orientations according to their positions and morphology.However,psych adjuncts in Chinese hold the initial position of a sentence or before the primary predicate in a sentence,but they semantically cover the four corresponding types in English,and moreover,they lack explicit corresponding morphology,which increases the difficulty of discriminating their semantic orientations and needs a deep research.How to distinguish the semantic orientation of English psych adjuncts according to their syntactic positions and morphology? How to judge and distinguish the different types of Chinese psych adjuncts in the same syntactic position? Can the differences in semantic types of psych adjuncts in different languages be explained uniformly? The goal of this research is to study the syntactic and semantic differences and relations of psych adjuncts in syntactic distribution,semantic orientation,morphological representation and aspectual constraints on verbs selection,as well as the motivation behind these differences and relations.Based on the event structure theory,this dissertation takes English and Chinese as the research object languages,and achieves the following four main findings through qualitative analyses of psych adjuncts in the two languages,assisted by word frequency statistics in the corpus.The syntactic structures of psych adjuncts reflect their event structures.A psych adjunct c-commands the modified,and the c-command relationship reflects different semantic relations and event structures.The higher the syntactic position of psych adjunct,the larger event structure,and the more subjective it conveys,and vice versa.This reflects a mapping relationship from the syntactic level,to the semantic level and then to the event structure level.The semantic types of verbs collocated with psych adjuncts are important clues for differentiating psych adjuncts,for they present different event structures.Motivational psych adjuncts usually co-occur with accomplishment verbs;Resultative psych adjuncts are usually achievement verbs,such as perceptual verbs,displacement verbs or ownership transfer verbs;manner-oriented psych adjuncts usually choose emotion-presenting verbs,such as verbs of verbal communication,non-verbal expressions and body movements;depictive psych adjuncts collocate with verbs of displacement,posture and life or status changes.Psych adjuncts show different hierarchies in causality,simultaneity and subjectivity in event structures as the following: for causality,speaker-oriented[+CAUSE] > agent-oriented [zero CAUSE] > manner /participant-oriented [-CAUSE];for simultaneity,speaker-oriented [-SIMU] <agent-oriented [partial SIMU] <manner/participant-oriented [full SIMU];for subjectivity,speaker-oriented > agent-oriented >manner /participant-oriented.Moreover,the hierarchy of subjectivity is also presented in Chinese depictive adjuncts according to their positions.The closer to the subject,the higher syntactic position,and the more subjective depiction,and vice versa.Psych adjuncts,as secondary predicates,have developed into depictive constructions,usually describing the mental state of a participant,following the semantic dependency of “simultaneity” between states and events.The differences between depictives and resultatives are reflected in concomitant vs causal,inherent vs incremental,durative vs telic,etc.according to their event structures.In conclusion,I propose that the semantic orientations and morphological representations of psych adjuncts result from syntactic and semantic interaction,whose interface—event structure—can be used to explain the syntactic and semantic differences between different types of psych adjuncts,and even the depictives composed of psych adjuncts,as well as the syntactic and semantic differences between depictives and resultatives.This study not only deepens the understanding of adjuncts,but also expands the research scope of psych predicates,establishes the grammatical basis of depictives in Chinese,and also develops and enriches achievements of event semantics in the fields of adjunct and construction researches. |
