Preposition Incorporation And The Study Of "V+Zi+O"

Mandarin Chinese is a kind of prepositional language. Its preposition generally placed before the predicate. However, some prepositions of modern Chinese, like "Yu","Zi","Dao","Wang","Zhi","Xiang","Gei","Zai" and so on, placed behind the predicate to form the structure of "verb+preposition+object". Since no one have studied preposition "Zi" with an object putting behind a verb, so there is a big room on studying the structure of "V+Zi+O".In this thesis, we are going to study the structure of "V+Zi+O" with five parts:Part one is introduction. This part includes four aspects:the purpose and significant of the research, the background and problems of the research, the theory and methods of research and the source of corpus.Part two is going to study the structure of "V+Zi+O" in synchronic. In this part, firstly, we are going to study what kind of verbs can get into this format, what is the semantic features should the verbs have. Then to describe what kind of objects can get into this format. At last, we take "V+Zi+O" as a whole, to see what kinds of syntactic component it can serve as.Part three is going to study the structure of "V+Zi+O" in diachronic. Firstly, we’ll find out what features of the verbs and objects which can enter into this structure should have in old Chinese. Secondly, we’ll contrast the verbs and objects in old Chinese with the verbs and objects which can enter into the structure of "V+Zi+O" in modern Chinese, and to find out the changed and unchanged. Because V is open in old Chinese, it’s difficult to calculate, so we won’t study V. At last, we begin with the discussion of how verbs turned into prepositions, then to describe the grammaticalization of "Zi", and to find out the mechanisms of Zi’s grammaticalization.Part four mainly talks about the phenomena of preposition incorporation. We start it with the research of Chinese. We find out that the prepositions in the structure of "verb+preposition+object" are all going to incorporate into the verb before it. Some dialects of China also have the trend of incorporation. Then we have investigated some other languages, we find that English, Chichewa, Dutch, French and Spanish all have the phenomena of preposition incorporation. Since it’s the prepositions behind the predicate incorporated into the predicate in Chinese and other languages, so we trying to figure out that preposition incorporation is a kind of language universals.Part five is conclusions. This part is trying to point out the conclusions of the study and the existing problems.