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Chapter 6 Conclusion
This thesis aimed to explore the thematic role Extent in Mandarin Chinese, since it is common in Mandarin Chinese and often appears as number expression and duration. Another purpose of this thesis was to analyze the sentence structure with three arguments, Theme, Experiencer and Extent, such as ㄧ本書寫了他三年 yi4ben3shu1 xie3le5 ta1 san1nian2 ‘It took him three years to write a book’. The
argument realization of the verbs violates thematic hierarchy, with the Theme in the subject position and the Experiencer as well as the Extent in the object position. This thesis proposes an explanation that activity and accomplishment verbs model the syntactic behavior of psychological verbs so that they can also require the three arguments, Theme, Experiencer and Extent. Dowty’s proto-role approach and Lexical Functional Grammar are further proposed to account for the lexical mapping of the sentence structure discussed in this thesis.
In the first part, the studies of the thematic role Extent were investigated. Extent is a circumstantial element, which does not participate in the action of the verb, and it is often a measure element so that it is termed as Extent in this thesis. In addition, Extent can be a cognitive object used to add specification to what has been implied by the verb. Compared with Patient and Theme, which have concrete objects as referents,
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Extent is a measurement of amount and has no concrete referent. According to the features of Extent noted in previous literature, this thesis proposes that number expression and duration phrases in Mandarin Chinese be assigned as Extent when they are arguments in sentences because they display the features of Extent.
In the second part, the sentence structure, such as ㄧ 本 書 寫 了 他 三 年 yi4ben3shu1 xie3le5 ta1 san1nian2 ‘It took him three years to write a book’, was
investigated. It was found that only activity and accomplishment verbs can occur in such sentence structure and that the subject can be an indefinite NP, definite NP or pronoun. This thesis proposes that activity and accomplishment verbs model the sentence structure of psychological verbs, such as 這個問題困擾了他三天 zhe4ge5 wen4wi2 kun4zao3le5 ta1 san1tian1 ‘This question has bothered him for three days’,
so that the Agent 他 ta1 ‘he’ also contains the interpretation of Experiencer and becomes a composite role. Different types of psychological verbs were investigated in this part, and it was found that they can be divided into subject-experiencer and object-experiencer verbs. The sentence strcuture discussed in this thesis is the same as that of object-experiencer psych verbs.
In the last part of this thesis, we propose to apply Lexical Functional Grammar and Dowty’s proto-role approach to explain the argument realization of the sentence structure discussed in the thesis. First, Dowty’s proto-role entailments are applied to
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analyze the Theme and the Experiencer into proto-agent and proto-patient. Since the verbs model the sentence structure of psych verbs, only the Experiencer of the composite will participate in the lexical mapping and the Agent is suppressed. In the sentence structure, the Theme is classified as a proto-agent and the Experiencer as a proto-patient so that the Theme is in the subject position and the Experiencer is in the object position. The Extent, due to its intrinsic feature [+o] and default feature [+r], is mapped to OBJθ. In addition, due to the causative meaning of the sentences, the Theme bears the feature [cause] and the Experiencer the feature [affectee]. According to Pesetsky (1995) and Li (1995), the Cause is regarded as more prominent than the Affectee and is thus mapped to the subject position, which is consistent with the result of lexical mapping.
To sum up, in Mandarin Chinese, duration phrases can be assigned as Extent when they are arguments in sentences because duration can be considered as measurement of time. In addition, activity and accomplishment verbs can model the syntactic behavior of psychological verbs and have three arguments, with the Theme in the subject position and the Experiencer as well as Extent in complement positions.
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