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Title:
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Enriched Composition and Inference in the Argument Structure of Chinese
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Author:
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Ren Zhang
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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York University
, Graduate Program in English
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Degree Date:
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2002
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Semantics
Syntax
Cognitive Science
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Subject Language(s):
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Chinese, Mandarin
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Director(s):
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Robert D.
Peter Avery
Ruth King
Diane Massam
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Abstract:
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The empirical focus of this dissertation is a set of non-canonical argument structure phenomena in Mandarin Chinese in which the external and the direct internal argument bear a non-transparent semantic relation to the eventuality expressed by the verb of a sentence, as with Xiaowang sile fuqin ('Xiaowang died (his) father': 'Xiaowang's father died') and Xiaowang jinchang chi zhejia changuan ('Xiaowang often eats this restaurant': 'Xiaowang often has his meal in this restaurant'). Such phenomena pose a challenge to the Projectionist view of the relation between the lexicon and the syntax, according to which the number of syntactic arguments is determined by the lexical semantics of the verb. I propose a semantic account of such 'unselected' arguments within the framework of Conceptual Semantics (e.g. Jackendoff 1990) and situate my proposals within a general constructionist perspective of linguistic theory (Jackendoff 2000). Discussing a wide range of data, I show that the 'unselected' internal and external arguments are licensed in terms of an enriched view of conceptual combination and inferences and that no abstract syntactic mechanisms need to be invoked for such phenomena.
First, a schematic conceptual structure of the eat restaurant type of examples is proposed, which can be roughly glossed as 'one entity undertakes an event by affecting another entity in some way'. Based on such a general conceptual structure as well as the lexical conceptual structures of the elements in the construction, I propose three conditions governing the semantics of the construction: (1) the event is brought into existence by an agentive quale (Pustejovksy 1995) in which some default entity x is affected; (2) the unselected complement expresses an entity m with a telic quale that caters to the need of the event in (1); and (3) there should be no redundancy between x and m. Exceptions to such generalizations are treated under a Preference Rule System of defeasible typicality conditions, based on Lascarides and Copestake (1998).
Secondly, three constructions, the possessum-object construction, the retained-object passive construction and the locative inversion construction, are subsumed under the category of 'unselected' subjects and are given a uniform treatment in term of conceptual inferences and a Noteworthiness Condition, drawing on Nunberg's (1995) work on predicate transfer. Both the possessum-object construction and the locative inversion construction share a conceptual structure in which a Thing or a Place is predicated over by a State as its property, whereas the conceptual structure of a retained-object passive is defined in schematic action-tier terms as one entity z reacting to an event involving its possessum, which in turn affects z lexically or contextually. The conceptual structures of these constructions are linked to those of their canonical alternations by two types of inference rules involving set inclusion and inferences from a spatial event with a Place adjunct or a Location argument. Constraints on predicate expressions follow from the conceptual structures of the constructions. In particular, the predicator in possessum-object and locative inversion constructions must express a State, with help from the contributions of particular aspectual particles such as le and guo.
The study shows that an elaborate semantic theory, embedded within a parallel architecture (as manifested in Construction Grammar, for example), offers a more adequate solution to the non-canonical argument structure phenomena discussed in this dissertation than approaches that adopt a syntactocentric outlook. Thus by virtue of the research reported here a valuable alternative is offered to the syntactic approaches in the formal studies of Mandarin Chinese.
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