A Study On Two Causative Sentences In Modern Chinese

The two causative sentences covered by this essay don't include the forms with marks as "使""令""叫""让" and so on . It's a special construction in modern Chinese, and the verbs of this sentence have "causative usage". Studying from the dominant grammar relationship, the relation between the verb and the object is just verb to object. But while studying from the recessive semantics structure, it is different from the common relation as to control and to be controlled , it means "the subject dominants and influence the object, the subject makes the object do something or has certain consequences or changes", that is a special relation relationship of "verb and object". As an important grammar phenomenon of Chinese, there are pretty detailed analysis and study on "causative usage" in academic field of Chinese grammar. Such as Yang feng-qing(1982), Diao yan-bin (1997), Zhang jing-yu (2001), Zhang you-jun (1998) etc, they approached this topic in the study of the comparison of sentences and the function of the parts of speech, but so far the grammarians haven't made a deep systematic study causatives in modern Chinese on "S-V/V_R-O" structures. This paper studies and analyzes the "S-V/V_R-O" structures from syntax, semantics and pragmatics. And on this basis, we compare the differences and similarities between the two types of causative sentences. Except the preface and the conclusion this paper falls into five parts. Part one and part two have surveyed the V (causative verb) and VR in "(S)-V-O/S-V_R-O" structures. First we analyze the thematic structures of causative verbs, on which we classify the causative verbs. And last we briefly analyze the semantic structures of causative verbs. Part three analyzes the characteristics of causatives in syntax and semantics. According to their respective features we study the differences and similarities between the two special causatives sentences. In addition, the semantic direction, causative state and grammar principles of causative sentences have been observed as well. Part four probes the semantic role of two causative sentences in detail. We have divided the sub-causative structures based on the different lexical meanings of subjects and objects and made a further research on the semantic clauses of the two causative sentences. In part five we have briefly studied the pragmatic meanings of causative constructions.