The Event Structure In The Wenling Dialect

Based on the Exo-Skeletal Model,this paper makes a theoretical explanation and cross language comparison for the event structure of the Wenling dialect.This paper mainly consists of following three parts:Chapter 1 is theoretical preparation.after comparing the two major theoretical orientations in generative grammar:the lexical approach and constructivist approach,we introduces the"Exo-Skeletal Model"proposed by Borer and the reconstruction of this theory claimed by Hu,thus clarifying the theoretical framework adopted in this paper.At the end of this chapter,we define two types of structures that this paper focuses on:resultatives and directional structure.Chapters 2 to 3 is the description and explanation of language phenomenon.In Chapter 2,based on the“SOV”word order of the resultatives in Wenling dialect,we provide a new functional structure for the coding of event structures,under the framework of the Exo-Skeletal Model.In this coding mode,quantitative aspect head is decomposed into two functional categories:inner aspect head and quantity head.The inner aspect head is responsible for coding the telicity of events,and the quantity head is responsible for coding the cumulative of events.The theme argument is base-generated at[Spec,Quan P],and the event projection（EP）is used as the complement of Quan P.This chapter also explains several main irregular phenomena of Wenling dialect,just like the co-occurrence of progressive/durative aspect marker and SVO word order,and attributes the reasons to the differences in the realization positions of different head and topicalization.Chapter 3examines the morphosyntactic features of the main verbs,speaker-oriented items,location-oriented items,and locative in the directional structure of Wenling dialect,and further discusses some morphological constraints,such as exponent defective and morphological saturation conditions.Chapter 4 is about cross-dialect comparison.We mainly investigate the split resultatives in Shanghai dialect and Shaoxing dialect,and the phenomenon that the object can still be located after the L-S chunk in Hakka,Min and Cantonese.This paper claims that the VOR structures of Shanghai dialect and Shaoxing dialect are different:the object in the VOR structure of Shanghai dialect can only be realized by monosyllable pronouns,which is an acategorial clitics.In contrast,the object of in the VOR structures of Shaoxing dialect is a complete argument.In addition,the difference in the motion constructions between Hakka,Min and Cantonese and Mandarin is not the difference in the morphological saturation condition in essence,but the difference in whether the functional head P_place has exponent defective.On the basis of the above discussion,we summarized the parameter levels related to the resultatives and the directional structure in natural language.