A Contrastive Study Of Causative Categories Both In English And Chinese From The Perspective Of Construction Grammar

As a universal phenomenon in languages, causatives have always been one of the hot issues investigated by linguists. Many researchers have made great efforts to study them and have scored great achievements. However, various expressions of causatives make such a study so difficult that some of the relevant issues still call for further research.Construction Grammar, as a new theoretical system based on cognitive grammar, has received wide recognition in the past twenty years. It has its unique power in explaining linguistic phenomena. This thesis makes a redefinition of construction in Construction Grammar, and adopts it as the theoretical framework for the present research. Combining semantic with syntactic analysis, this thesis makes a contrastive study of causative categories both in English and Chinese,and probes into their similarities and dissimilarities between these two languages. Meanwhile, the underlying reasons for the asymmetry will be uncovered as well. It is hoped that what this thesis has observed can further promote the causative research.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One is a general introduction to the significance, methodology, data and organization of the present research. In Chapter Two, the previous investigations of causatives both at home and abroad will be presented and discussed. It is found that there are some significant aspects of causatives still left unexplored. Chapter Three offers an introduction of the theoretical framework: Construction Grammar. What is the most important in this chapter is the renewed definition of construction which is found to be more powerful in explaining causatives. Chapter Four makes a contrastive analysis of causative categories both in English and Chinese and find that there exists the asymmetry of causative constructions between the two languages. In addition, the underlying reasons for the asymmetry will be discussed in this chapter. Chapter Five is the conclusion of the whole research.Based on the above discussion and analysis, it is found that there exists asymmetry of causative constructions in English and Chinese. English usually uses such morphological devices as affixation and identical shift to express causatives, while Chinese principally uses analytical devices, such as the resultative construction and the object-subject construction. It is observed that there are three underlying reasons for this asymmetry. Firstly, English is subject to various morphological changes throughout its evolution. However, Chinese, poor in derivatives, is an isolating language. Different historical origins make English full of morphological changes and the Chinese language less of grammatical inflections. Therefore, English affixation is considerably productive and Chinese is characterized by a strong reliance on analytical devices. Secondly, English words are a kind of alphabetic writing. The alphabetic forms are settled basically for sounds, rather than for meaning, which makes English express causatives more freely by means of affixation or identical shift. Chinese characters are a kind of ideography which indicates meanings directly in most cases. However, because of the limitation of the forms, especially for those one-morpheme characters, Chinese has to use analytical devices, such as the resultative construction and the object-subject construction, to convey causative meanings. Thirdly, the differences between English and Chinese causative constructions can be attributed to different language typologies, which give rise to different ways of conceptualization of causation.