A Contrastive Study On Ergative Pairs In English And Chinese

An ergative verb is a verb whose action affects the subject of the verb with the patient as its subject. The grammatical phenomenon of ergative verbs was first proposed by Perlmutter in the Unaccusative Hypothesis, in which the class of intransitive verbs consists of two subclasses—unergative verbs and unaccusative verbs. As the name indicates, an unaccusative verb is unable to take an object with accusative case since it takes a D-Structure object without a subject. As a subset of unaccusative verbs, ergative verbs have transitive counterparts. So ergative pair refers to this transitive/intransitive verb pair.The ergative phenomenon has been studied over the past three decades in Western linguistics. Contrary to the thorough study in Western linguistics, research on ergative verbs in Chinese linguistics is relatively incomplete and unsystematic. Drawing on the thorough syntactical and lexical semantic approaches in Western linguistics, this thesis presents a contrastive analysis of ergative pairs in English and Chinese through collecting relatively complete data from two target languages in order to make contribution to the cross-linguistic research on ergative verbs.Since ergativity is syntactically encoded and semantically determined, the analysis on ergative verbs is divided into two parts—syntactic aspect and semantic aspect. First, the syntactic characteristics of the ergative alternation are introduced. English and Chinese ergative alternations undergo the same process that can be characterized as (1) a shift in valency of the arguments of the verb; (2) parallelism between the object of the transitive construction and the subject of the intransitive construction and (3) the preservation of the thematic role assigned to the verb's internal argument. Then through the comparison among ergatives, passives and middles, similarities and striking distinctions between them are found. Finally, the direction of derivation for ergative pairs in both languages is discussed and it is concluded that ergative transitives are basic in ergative pairs.Concerning semantic aspect, the three semantic properties—change of state, agentivity and telicity—surrounding the ergative alternation are first explored. Then through categorization, we find that external causation and spontaneous occurrence codetermine the semantic properties of English ergative pairs. Based on a relatively thorough collection of data and their semantic properties, the classification of Chinese ergative pairs are externally caused verbs, verbs of body movement, and verbs of uniting meaning, in which verbs of body movement and verbs of uniting meaning are unique in Chinese. And verbs of Existence and Appearance in English and verbs in sentences of Existence and Appearance in Chinese only show the diagnostics of surface unaccusativity.The above contrastive study of English and Chinese ergative verbs shows that Chinese ergative pairs are syntactically the same to English ergative pairs while they are semantically similar to English ergative pairs with some varieties. The contrastive study on ergative pairs in English and Chinese hopes to inspire the acquisition of English as a second language for Chinese students.