Study On The Phenomena Of One-place Verbs With Objects In Mandarin Chinese

One-place verbs refer to intransitive verbs in traditional grammar.Ever since Perlmutter’s Unaccusative Hypothesis,researchers have widely accepted the view that intransitive verbs can be subdivided into unaccusative verbs and unergative verbs.According to the strict definition in grammar,one-place verbs cannot take an object.However,there are a lot of phenomena of one-place verbs with objects in language.Researchers have deeply and widely discussed the special grammar phenomena of one-place verbs with objects in Mandarin Chinese.All their research provides this thesis a lot of language facts and theoretical support.Inspired by the research of James Huang’s Light Verb Syntax and referenced on the research results of Case Theory,Thematic Theory and Light Verb Syntax,this thesis indicates that the phenomena of one-place verbs with objects in Mandarin Chinese can get a reasonable explanation in Light Verb Syntax.Chapter 1 briefly reviews the current study of one-place verbs with objects in Mandarin Chinese in the last 20 years from the aspects of Valence Grammar,Cognitive Grammar and Generative Grammar.It also introduces the topic basis and significance,research methods and scope as well as corpus sources in this thesis.Chapter 2 introduces the concept of Thematic Theory and one-place verbs in order to provide a theoretical preparation for the following analysis of the phenomena of one-place verbs with objects in Mandarin Chinese.First,it introduces Thematic Theory in the aspects of thematic relation,thematic role and thematic criterion as well as the difference between thematic role and argument.Second,it introduces the concept of Theme into the research of one-place verb.Third,it introduces unaccusative verbs and unergative verbs by discussing the difference between unaccusative verbs and ergative verbs,presenting the diagnostics criteria of unaccusative verbs,and classifying the unergative verbs.Chapter 3 primarily gives a detailed analysis of the phenomena of unaccusative verbs with objects,points out the shortage of Case Theory in analysis,and introduces James Huang’s Light Verb Syntax and Zhu Xingfan’s analysis.Then,under the perspective of Light Verb Syntax,this chapter respectively analyses unaccusative verbs of lai and chen with objects in existential sentences and unaccusative verbs si with objects in possessum-object construction.In this thesis,we hypothesize that there is a light verb inserted in existential sentences and possessum-object construction.The light verb v in existential sentences and the light verb BECOME in possessum-object construction cause the phenomena of unaccusative verbs with objects.Chapter 4 primarily gives a detailed analysis of the phenomena of unergative verbs with objects and testifies Liu Tanzhou’s view of FocusP.Then,under the perspective of Light Verb Syntax,this chapter analyses the phenomena of unergative verbs fei with objects.The last part is a conclusion of the whole thesis,summing up both the research results and the question still requiring further explanation.