On The VP+DurP Construction In Mandarin Chinese

This thesis concentrates on the VP+DurP construction in Mandarin Chinese.The motivation for us to investigate this construction is due to its different semantic readings,and the ambiguity caused by the same sentence in some cases.Therefore,this thesis will provide an explanation for the verb types,and the structural cause of ambiguity under the scope of Generative Grammar.From the perspective of semantics,previous research has identified three different readings concerning the VP+DurP construction in Mandarin Chinese,namely the duration reading,the completion reading(Ma,1981;Chen,1988 etc.)and the discontinuous action reading(Wang and Chin,2018).In the duration reading,the DurP refers to the duration of a certain action.In the completion reading,the DurP refers to the duration from the completion of an event to the utterance time,which is called the duration of state by Ma(1981).The discontinuous action reading is recently explored,in which the DurP refers to the duration of a discontinuous action.This reading can further be divided into three sub-readings.In the first sub-reading,the DurP refers to the duration of a discontinuous action.The second and third sub-reading is respectively called the sufficiency reading and the shelf-life reading,since they are mainly concerned with food or drink.Previous research also made respective classification on the verb types with regard to each semantic reading.In addition to its semantic interpretations,researchers also made a deep investigation on the generative mechanism of this construction.There are mainly four distinctive analytical approaches.The first,represented by Ma(1981)and Zhu(1982),treats the DurP as a complement of the verb,and label it as time object The second approach,adopted by Huang et al.(2009)and many formal linguists,treats the DurP as an adjunct of the VP.The third,represented by Tai(1973)and Teng(1975),treats the DurP as an underlying higher predicate that follows a sentential subject The fourth approach is recently explored by Wang and Chin(2018),which notices that neither of the former three can suffice to account for the presence of different interpretations and ambiguity,and thus adopts the adjunct view to explain the duration reading,the underlying higher predicate view to explain the completion reading.With regard to the discontinuous action reading,the fourth approach put forward that the DurP is based-generated at the complement position of the VP,with the meaning of the VP being.Previous literature has made very detailed analysis on the verb types of this construction,and the interpretation of the DurP,but some issues remain unsolved.This thesis aims to answer the following three questions:(1)Why may the VP+DurP construction in Mandarin Chinese give rise to different readings,and what are these readings exactly?(2)What is the generative mechanism of the VP+DurP construction?(3)Why may the same sentence in some cases generate ambiguity?Therefore,this thesis will be based on the Structural Dependency and the Autonomy of Syntax in Generative Grammar,and adopts X-bar theory as a way to show syntactic structures.Then we propose that the cause for different semantic readings and ambiguity results from the different boundness of verbs;every semantic reading has its corresponding syntactic structures.The first research question aims to identify what semantic readings we can get from this single construction in Mandarin Chinese.We integrate previous literature,introduce our own observation of language data,and put forward three semantic readings.In the first semantic reading,the DurP refers to a certain action,either continuous or discontinuous.In the second reading,the DurP refers to the time span from the point of completion of an event to the utterance time.The third semantic reading expresses the time limit of the topic;besides it has two sub-readings,namely the incremental sufficiency of the topic,and the decremental remainder of the topic.The second research question aims to build a one-to-one correspondence between each semantic reading and its own generative mechanism.For the duration reading,the DurP functions as the adjunct of the VP.For the completion reading,the DurP is an underlying higher predicate that takes a settle event as its subject.For the time limit of the topic reading,the DurP is the complement of the bare verb root which is selected by qualia structure.We postulate that the bare verb merges with the light verb(?)BF/(?)REMAIN to undergo syntactic operations,after which the whole constituency will get its phonological realization.For the third research question,we believe that the ambiguity results from two separate reasons.The first ambiguity arises between the duration reading and the completion reading,and it is due to the property of boundness of the VP.For bound verbs,when they are followed by a DurP,the construction leads to the completion reading.For unbound verbs,when they are followed by a DurP,it leads to the duration reading.There are also transbound verbs in between,and when they are followed by a DurP,the construction will allow to have both readings.In this thesis,we will argue that the generative mechanisms behind these two readings are different.Another type of ambiguity may arise between the incremental sufficiency reading and decremental remainder reading within the third interpretation.We postulate that the reason for this is because the verb root is merged with different light verbs(?)BE/(?)REMAIN.When the verb root is merged with(?)BE,this construction leads to the incremental sufficiency reading,while the(?)REMAIN gives rise to the decremental remainder reading.Compared with previous research,this thesis systematically combs the semantic interpretations of the VP+DurP construction in Mandarin Chinese,and presents a deeper analysis on each interpretation.In the meantime,we also offer new language data and analysis methods,which provides new perspectives for understanding this and other constructions in Mandarin Chinese.