Chinese Ergative-like Construction

This book first introduces the ins and outs of the debate between generative grammar and construction grammar in the context of modern linguistic theory and introduces various related terms, such as unergative verbs, unaccusative verbs, and "Burzio's law". Secondly, authors discuss the following questions: 1) Is "Wang Mian's father died" derived from "Wang Mian's father died" through the displacement of "Wang Mian"? Do the two belong to the same sentence structure? 2) Is "Wang Mian's father died" derived from "Wang Mian experienced his father's death" through the displacement of "death"? Do the two belong to the same sentence structure? 3) Do "Wang Mian, his father is dead" and "Wang Mian, his father is dead" belong to the same sentence structure? Is there any shift and derivation relationship? Can "father" in both sentences be designated as the subject case? 4) What is the difference in the meaning of sentence patterns when "non-ergative verbs" represented by "disease" and "laugh" and "non-accusative verbs" represented by "die" and "come" take objects? 5) How do you view the relationship between the historical formation of "Wang Mian's father died" and the "generation" hypothesis in the synchronic system? Finally, authors discuss the explanatory power of the construction method and the syntactic shift method and which of the argument view and topic view of Chinese syntax can better reflect the essence of Chinese grammar.

Introduces a new approach to explain specific phenomenon in theoretic Chinese linguistics Summarizes the methodologies that adopted by Chinese grammarians in analyzing special sentence patterns Presents the evolution history of Chinese syntactic approaches since the 1950s

Autorentext

Dr. Tanzhou Liu serves as the senior research fellow at Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Science. Her research interests include syntax and semantics. She has published many research papers in Chinese famous peer-reviewed journals. Her representative work is On Co-referential Appositions in Chinese, published by China Social Sciences Press. She was awarded the 19th Lv Shuxiang Young Linguist Award of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Inhalt

The Major Debate on Chinese sentential subject and object in the 1950s.- The possessor-subject and possessum-object (PSPO) sentence and the splitting analysis of the possessive phrase.- An analytic approach based on movement.- Unaccusative Theory and related theories.- A synthetic approach based on construction and speaker empathy.- A constructional view of the Wangmian sentence and its discourse functions.- Conceptual blending and speaker empathy.