The Syntax-Semantics Interface of Resultative Constructions in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese

The Syntax-Semantics Interface of Resultative Constructions in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese Pui Lun Chow Department of Linguistics, University of Hong Kong, MB126, Main Building, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong (852), China h08dezi@hku.hk Abstract. The mapping between grammatical functions and thematic roles of resultative constructions has been widely discussed in different frameworks of syntax, and theories have been proposed to account for the mismatches between them. The question behind the construction of these mapping theories always lies in the choice of suppressing one of the two competing roles or fusing them in order to maintain the Consistency Principle or Uniqueness Condition. However, these mechanisms always involve ad hoc additional mapping rules which need further justification or they may not be applicable to other mapping phenomena. In this paper, I am going to analyze the mapping phenomenon of resultative constructions in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese by drawing insights from conceptual semantics (Jackendoff, 1990). I will show how conceptual structures can capture the special properties of resultative constructions and handle the mapping phenomenon mentioned above naturally. Keywords: resultative constructions, mapping, conceptual semantics structure, verb-copying constructions, syntactic-semantic interface Section 1 Introduction The grammatical functions and thematic roles mapping phenomenon of resultative constructions has been widely discussed in different frameworks of syntax and mapping theories have been proposed to account for the mismatches between grammatical functions and thematic roles (the Causative Hierarchy account (Li 1995); Lexical Mapping Theory ((Levin 1986) and (Bresnan and Zaenen 1990)); Event Structure Account (Alsina 1992), etc.). The question behind the construction of these mapping theories always lies in the choice of suppressing one of the two competing roles or fusing two component roles in order to maintain the Consistency Principle or Uniqueness Condition, which says a particular attribute in a functional structure must have one and only one value (Dalrymple, 2001). However, the mechanisms of suppressing one of the competing roles or fusing two component roles always involve ad hoc additional mapping rules which need further justification or they may not be applicable to other mapping phenomena. 25th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, pages 80–89 80 In this paper, I am going to show how the semantics of resultative constructions in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese can be linked to the syntax by drawing insights from conceptual semantics (Jackendoff, 1990). Along with a demonstration of the application of conceptual structures in accounting for the mapping phenomenon in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese resultative constructions, the paper will focus on the strange or marked mapping phenomenon of a Mandarin Chinese sentence discussed in Her’s (2006) paper, “張三 追-累-了 李四 Zhāngsān zhuī-lèi-le Lǐsì” (John chase-tired-ASP Lee)1. I will also show in this paper how the representation of conceptual structures can capture the special properties of resultative constructions and at the same time handle the relevant mapping phenomena, including that of the marked structure mentioned above, naturally. Section 2 The Conceptual Semantics Approach To handle the argument-function mapping of possible ambiguous interpretations of resultative constructions like the sentence above in …

Content truncated to 500 words