A Syntactic Study On Chinese Serial Verb Construction

The Serial Verb Construction（hence SVC）occurs in one third of the languages in the world.Whether the SVC exists in Chinese has sparked off considerable debates,especially about its obscure boundary,definition and derivation.This thesis probes into Chinese SVCs from the syntactic perspective.Based on previous studies,the present study proposes a classification and a definition of Chinese SVCs,and accounts for their derivation and compares Chinese SVCs with other similar structures.The major findings are as follows.First,the classification of Chinese SVCs excluding the pivot construction and the object sharing construction is made from syntactic and semantic perspectives.Based on Gao（2003）,this thesis classifies Chinese SVCs with descriptive properties[±SEQUENCE]and[±FOCUS]into three types:the classic Chinese SVC,the weak classic Chinese SVC and the peripheral Chinese SVC.Then,ten criteria are summarized from working definitions of SVCs in previous studies and tested with Chinese data.The results show that different from SVCs in some other languages,in Chinese SVCs,the tense/aspect/mood/negation are not always shared by VPs and they can be put in non-peripheral positions;verbs are not necessarily full verbs,but they should be able to denote events independently.According to the above analyses,a tentative Chinese SVC definition is given as follows.A Chinese SVC is a monoclausal construction containing a sequence of verbphrases where verbs share the same argument（s）,denote events independently,and act together as one single predicate.There is no intermediate pause,predicate-argument relationship or overt linking element between verbs.Next,the study makes a tentative account of the derivation of Chinese SVCs.In the verification of its asymmetry,this thesis finds that there is one and only one head verb in each Chinese SVC,and that it must be a content verb.The non-head VP can be regarded as an adjunct merging with the main clause through the Sideward Movement（Nunes2004;Sun 2013）under the Minimalist Program.The structure of Chinese SVC could be[_TPta[_T’T[_VP1t_i[_V’na[_VP2dao[_Vp Spec₂[_v’qie[_NP2rou]]]]]]]].Finally,this study compares Chinese SVCs with other similar structures,that is,the Verb Object Structure with verb as its object,the Verb Complement Structure with directional verb as its complement,the Subordinate Structure with adverbial verb as its modifier,and the Coordinate Structure.These comparisons testify the feasibility of the proposed definition of Chinese SVC:the“fixed VP order”is applied in comparisons between Chinese SVC and the Verb Object Structure or the Coordinate Structure;the“no pause”is applied in comparisons between Chinese SVC and the Coordinate Structure or complex sentences;the“argument sharing”is applied in comparisons between Chinese SVC and the Verb Object Structure;the“independent denotation ability of verbs”is applied in comparisons between Chinese SVC and the Verb Complement Structure or the Subordinate Structure;the“no predicate-argument relationship”is applied in comparisons between Chinese SVC and the Verb Object Structure;and the“no overt linking elements”is applied in comparisons between Chinese SVC and the Subordinate Structure or the Coordinate Structure.These findings can prove the independence of SVCs in Chinese.However,the language facts discussed in this paper are limited and further studies are needed to verify the validity of interpretations of this study.