A Syntactic And Semantic Study Of Verb-copying Sentences In Mandarin Chinese

Verb-copying sentence is a special sentence pattern in mandarin Chinese. It refers to the certain structure in which a verb is copied in a clause ~ an object follows the former verb and a complement follows the latter one. The researches on the verb-copying sentences began in 1940s. Although the previous studies have achieved big progress there are still some incomplete aspects. Linguists have not achieved a unified view towards the questions such as the generation and the classification of the verb-copying and the sentence pattern alternation between the verb-copying and the other sentence patterns.This paper reexamines the verb-copying sentences from syntactic and semantic points of view based on the previous studies. In the syntactic study the author explains the generation mechanism of the verb-copying sentences based on Chomsky's latest theory -The Minimalist program. The author believes that the second verb displays as the main predicate and the first one is the copied mirror image which doesn't bear the grammatical features and only have phonological and semantic features. In the semantic study the author reclassifies the causative and non-causative verb-copying sentences. Combining Tang Cuiju and Xiong Zhongru's researches the author points out that the predicates of the causative verb-copying sentences must satisfy the logic expression:λzλyλx [CAUSE (DO (x, y), BECOME(STATE(z)))]; and in the non-causative verb-copying sentences VO and V'C have a declarative relationship. The author sub-classifies the two kinds of verb-copying by observing the semantic direction of the complements and finds the result that the verb-copying sentences can semantically alternate with BA construction in the condition that the semantic meaning of the complements directs to the objects.