Typical Resultative Construction In English And Chinese: A Cognitive Approach

As an important linguistic phenomenon, the resultative construction occupies a unique place in the study of syntax and semantics. The foreign scholars study it from the syntactic, semantic and constructional approach, while the Chinese scholars are mainly along two dimensions: synchronic and diachronic studies. However, few of them compare this construction between in English and Chinese. This dissertation gives a comparative study about typical resultative construction in English and Chinese from the syntactic and semantic aspect in order to expose the similarities and differences between them and explore the cognitive motivations.At the syntactic level, English typical resultative construction generally uses the simple past tense to express the finish of action, while in Chinese it generally co-occurs with certain functional words such as the aspect marker le. And there is a Direct Object Restriction (DOR) on the English, but it is not always the case with the Chinese. The object and resultative complement in English are less closely combined than in Chinese. In addition, typical resultative construction in Chinese has more variations. At the semantic level, the causative meaning can be explained by the theory of force transmission. They can be semantically decomposed into two independent readings which are in the causal relation and describe events with a definite endpoint i.e. telic event. The resultative complement in English refers to the object, whereas in Chinese it refers to the object or subject. The adjective resultative complement in English typical resultative construction has more restrictions than in Chinese. Besides, ambiguity exists in some Chinese typical resultative construction, which does not exist in English. Because of the common bodily experiences and the same model to construe the typical causative event, they have some similarities especially at the semantic level. However, due to people's cognition and the different cultures, there exist differences between them especially at the syntactic level. The typical resultative construction in English conforms to the iconicity of sequence, whearas in Chinese it is the result of grammaticalization and possesses the distance-iconic motivation.