A Comparative Study Of Causative Constructions In Chinese And English:Based On Light Verb Theory

“Causative” is an important syntactic category in human languages, which is regarded as one heated topic of language researches for its complexity in semantic relations and syntactic performances. Causative constructions mainly express “the change of state or position of someone or something caused by another one or thing”. Researchers at home and abroad have made lots of studies from different aspects, such as cognition, semantics or syntax and accomplished great achievements, but given little consideration to the explanation of the generative process and comparisons between English and Chinese causative constructions.Light Verb Theory is an important component of Generative Grammar. As an optimal and reasonable way to express the internal structure of verb phrases, the theory is widely used to account for the derivation of various constructions in the Minimalist Program. The light verb can occur as a free morpheme, or as a bound morpheme with phonetic form or not in the concrete usage. The bound morpheme having strong affixal features will induce the movement and incorporation of the lower verb. In the thesis, causative constructions are divided into three kinds on the basis of different forms of light verbs: syntactic analytic causative constructions, lexical synthetic causative constructions and resultative compound causative constructions.Through the analysis of English and Chinese causative constructions, the thesis shows their underlying structures are consistent though their surface structures are seemingly various:(i) the structure of syntactic analytic causative constructions is MS + V1 + ES + EV;(V1 is causative verb which is a free morpheme, like “make”, “have” in English and “shi”, “ling”, “rang” in Chinese);(ii) the structure of lexical synthetic causative constructions is MS+V+ES, in which the light verb is a bound morpheme having an affix or zero-form without pronunciation which triggers the movement and incorporation of the lower verb and becomes the causative verb;(iii) the structure of resultative compound causative constructions is MS + MV + ES + EV or MS + MV + EV + ES, where the occurrence of the concrete action “MV” leads to the complexity of the structure. Besides the similarities between English and Chinese causative constructions, some differences in these two languages can be found: with rich morphology and high lexicalization degree, English adopts more lexical synthetic causative constructions to express causative relations, while Chinese tend to use compound structures or analytic expressions to show causative relations.Within the framework of generative grammar, based on Light Verb Theory, the thesis makes a new comprehensive classification of English and Chinese causative constructions. Through the systematic comparison and analysis, their various expressive forms and complicated generative processes will be found, and universals and differences in these two languages can be explored, which make a great contribution to the further research of English and Chinese structures.