Ⅱ. L I TERATURE REVI EW
2.3 Remarks
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V-shang seems to function as the marker a successive aspect and an inchoative aspect by showing an ongoing action and the beginning of a state. Therefore, the analysis of V-shang is full of paradoxes. The explanation of the classification of V-shang shows mixtures of semantic features and aspectual functions.
2.3 Remark
In the lexical meanings of shang, with the movement meaning from a low position to a high position, there are nine extended meanings collected from Shi (1993), Zhang (1995), and Liu (1998). Yet, the extended meanings are overlapped by the preceding verb in V-shang, as Liu (1999) has mentioned. In other words, the researchers are still unsure of the extended meanings of shang. Thus, it is important to re-think the use of V-shang.
The classification of the phrasal meaning of V-shang can be distinguished by the meaning of movement or non-movement. The sense of movement is in a vertical direction. Non-movement is complex as we combine all of the classifications from the previous studies because researchers have considered the result of an action, a state showing the beginning of change or aspect presenting ‘ongoing’ and
‘accomplishment’ as the features of V-shang. Further to the movement meaning, the
‘non-moving action’ category remains inconsistent. The main problem is due to the
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mix in the levels of semantic and syntactic functions, so that different explanations are used to describe V-shang. According to previous studies, the semantic meanings of V-shang exhibit three types: directional movement, result, and state. V-shang meaning
‘a state’ in China does not show the same usage in Taiwan, but category of ‘state’
describes the final state of completed action, which can be categorized into category of ‘result.’ Hence, speaking generally, the meanings of V-shang in Taiwan Mandarin Chinese can be separated into directional and resultative.
Besides the semantic meanings, the functions of shang in V-shang may be a complement or verb particle. The nature of event in V-shang represents the complex usage. The complement modifies the action of the preceding verb. The content meaning shows the vertical movement of the action and the ending point of the action.
In opposition to the complement, the verb particle is the usage without the content meaning, which describes the situation in which shang cannot express the particular meaning but abstract function.
In regard to the types of the aspectual markers, V-shang seems to present perfective, successive, inchoative aspects (Li and Thompson, 1983; Chao, 1968). The features of perfective aspect match the usage of RVCs, but the successive and inchoative aspects usually display the ongoing event or the beginning of a state. Apart from Chao (1968), neither Comrie (1976), Li & Thompson (1983) nor Vendler (1957)
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added successive and inchoative situational types in the classification of the aspect.
Because of the finished action from the preceding verb, completed V-shang cannot attach to zhe‘in the action of…’著 and zai ‘at’在. As a result, V-shang seems to display a perfective aspect. When V-shang presents an ongoing event and the beginning of an action, it looks like the situational types of ‘successive aspect’ and
‘inchoative aspect.’
Therefore, following the above point of view, ai-shang ‘love’愛上 and ma-shang
‘blame’罵上 express the turning point of the completed change. They show perfective aspect which describes the finished turning point from the previous event. For example, zhongyu ‘finally’ 終於 in sentence (14) below marks the situation in which
Xiaoming tried hard for a long time.
(14) 小美 在 曉明 的 追求 下，終於 愛上 他 Xiaomei zai Xiaoming de zhuiqiu xia，zhongyu ai-shang ta Xiaomei zai Xiaoming de court under finally love him
‘After being courted by Xiaoming’s courting, Xiaomei finally fell in love with him.’
Ai-shang ‘love’ 愛上 and ma-shang ‘blame’ 罵上 also show the continuing situation,
which presents the successive aspect. Also, ai-shang refers to the beginning of the state that Mary loves John, which presents the inchoative aspect. Based on Chao (1968)’s study, it is found that ai-shang and ma-shang may present three kinds of
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situational types at the same time. If V-shang contains an aspectual function, more than one aspect can occur in the sentence (Chuang, 2001). Therefore, it is doubtful that V-shang really can denote aspectual functions.
As we have mentioned above, it can be seen that arriving at a definition of shang from previous studies is difficult, and the classification of V-shang still contains some paradoxical issues. In conclusion, due to the complexity of V-shang, the use of a systematic framework will help to solve the problem of classifying V-shang. The re-classification of the semantic categories of V-shang under a theoretical framework is the first step. In the following Chapter 3, this study will review the theories which can help to solve the above problems.
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Chapter 3
Theoretical framework
In order to solve the problems found in the analyses of previous studies, this chapter extends Talmy’s theory of motion-event. Talmy (2000)’s theory clearly describes the standard features in a motion-event, and it can be projected into the event portrayed by V-shang. This chapter will introduce the background knowledge of motion event and the way in which the Chinese frame differs from the typology in section 3.1. Section 3.2 introduces Lexical Functional Grammar to bridge the lexical semantics of V-shang with the syntactic structures.
3.1 Motion event
Since the directional complement shang indicates an action of movement, the present study explains the movement of a motion event according to Talmy (2000).
The features of a motion event are constrained by three characteristics in a language:
(i) it is colloquial in style; (ii) it is frequent in occurrence in speech; and (iii) it is pervasive. The Motion event in Figure 1 contains central elements, where ‘Figure’ is a
moved object, ‘Ground’ is the ending point of the motion, and ‘Path’ is the moving
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process. ‘Motion’ is encoded by the predicate, and it refers to the occurrence (MOVE) or nonoccurrence (Be located) which is a translational motion. The motion event excludes “self-contained motion,” which refers to rotation, oscillation and dilation.
Figure 2. Talmy (2000) Motion-event frame
Other external elements are associated with Cause of the movement and Manner of the action, which is called co-event. An example can be seen in the sentences in (15) of Talmy (2000): ‘the pencil’ functions as the Figure, and ‘the table’ represents the Ground. Path is shown by ‘on’ or ‘off.’ For example, (15a) presents Motion with the preposition ‘off,’ while (15b) indicates the location with ‘on.’ Manner and Cause are derived from predicates.
(15) Manner Cause
a. Motion The pencil rolled off the table. the pencil blew off the table b. Location The pencil lay on the table. the pencil stuck on the table
Talmy suggests that the best way to express Co-event is to distinguish subordinate clauses. There are three kinds of Co-event in (16). The main Motion event associated with Cause or Manner contains Figure, Path and Ground. The Figure can be agentive,
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non-agentive or even self-agentive. In English, Path is expressed by the prepositions,
so this kind of language is regarded as a satellite-framed language.
(16) (Talmy, 2000) a. BELoc + Manner
The lamp lay on the table. = [the lamp WASLoc on the table]
WITH-THE-MANNER-OF [the lamp lay there].
b. MOVE + Manner i. Nonagentive
The rock rolled down the hill. = [the rock MOVED down the hill]
WITH-THE-MANNER-OF [the rock rolled]
ii.Agentive
I bounced the keg into the storeroom. = [I MOVED the keg into the storeroom]
WITH-THE-MANNER-OF [I bounced the keg]
iii.Self-agentive
I ran down the stairs. = [I WENT down the stairs]
WITH-THE-MANNER-OF [I ran]
c. MOVE + Cause i. Nonagentive
The napkin blew off the table. = [the napkin MOVED off the table]
WITH-THE-CAUSE-OF [(something) blew on the napkin]
ii.Agentive
I kicked the keg into the storeroom. = [I MOVED the keg into the storeroom]
WITH-THE-CAUSE-OF [I kicked the keg].
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In a different kind of languages, predicates in their lexical meanings not only indicate the Manner of Motion but also Path. These kinds of verbs are called Path-conflating motion verbs. Talmy offers two types of languages: satellite-framed languages and verb-frame languages as in (17) below. The standard satellite-framed language is English, which is marked with particles like in, out, or across depicting Path, as in (17a) below. The style that predicates encode Path in the lexical meanings is a standard feature of verb-frame languages, as in Spanish.
(17)
a. English b. Spanish
I ran out the kitchen door. Sali por la puerta de la cocina.
‘I exited [by] the kitchen door.’
[Motion + Manner] Path Ground
verb satellite noun
[Motion + Path] Ground Manner
verb noun verb However, from Chen & Guo (2009), Chinese is regarded as a third type of language, because the construction in Chinese is different from the above two types of languages. The construction in (18) below is composed of two parallel verbs.
(18) [Motion + Manner] [Motion + Path] Ground
Verb Verb Noun
李四 爬 上 山 了。
Lisi pa shang shan le
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The first predicate expresses the Manner of the action, while the second predicate which is a verb rather than a satellite indicates the Path. Thus, it shows that Chinese combines features from a satellite-framed language as well as from a verb-frame language. A sentence with V-shang and the action verb provides a frame of motion event. Thus, with a directional complement shang, Path goes from the lower position to Ground, which is the top of the mountain, and the first verb provides the Cause of the action. The Figure is an Agent. Lisi is an Agent and also a causer who makes himself move.
3. 2 Thematic roles and Lexical Functional Grammar
In addition to Talmy’s elements in motion event, this study also uses thematic roles to modify the NP complement which follows after V-shang, especially the complements with the feature of [-Ground]. And then, this study uses Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) to map the lexical semantics of V-shang to the syntactic structure.
Thematic relations describe the semantic functions of noun phrases with respect to the action of the verb. Each noun phrase bears at least one thematic role in a sentence
(Andrew, 1985). The general characters of thematic roles are given below in (19):
(19) a. Agent: deliberately performs the action Bill ate his soup quietly.
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b. Experiencer: the entity that receives sensory or emotional input Susan heard the song.
c. Patient: undergoes the action and changes its state The falling rocks crushed the car.
d. Theme: undergoes the action but does not change its state I put the book on the table.
e. Time: the time at which the action occurs The rocket was launched yesterday.
f. Location: the place in which something is situated or takes place The monster was hiding under the bed.
Dowty (1991) and Bresnan (2001) proposed an implicational hierarchy of the subject;
that is, speakers place an Agent into subject position, and then the second preference is the Benefactive, then Theme/Patient, and finally Location as in (20).
(20)Thematic hierarchy: ag > ben > go/exp > inst > pt/th> loc
Dowty (1991) proposed a proto-role approach that two role types are needed to be defined, which are proto-agent and proto-patient. The following are lists of entailments for the two proto-roles.
(21) Proto-Agent entailments and examples (subject NP) a. volitional involvement: John is being polite to Bill.
b. sentience / perception: John knows/ believes the statement. John sees/ fears Mary.
c. causation: His loneliness causes his unhappiness.
d. movement: He accidently fell.
e. independent existence: John needs a new car.
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Dowty used the semantic entailments to characterize the properties of a Proto-Agent role. The sentence (21a) conveys that a verb entails that the activity of the role is volitional. As in (21b), the entailment of perception and sentience can be found in verbs such as stative perception verbs and stative psych predicates. Causation in (21c) means that the verb causes an event or change of state in another participant. It is often accompanied by movement. Movement, however, can be found alone without causation or volition, as in (21d). Independent existence in (21e) means that the NP is presumed to exist before and after the event and that it is not changed by the action of the verb.
(22) Proto-Patient entailments and examples (object NP) a. change of state: John erased the error.
b. incremental theme: John filled the glass with water.
c. casually affected: Smoking causes cancer.
d. stationary relative to another participant: The bullet entered the target.
e. existence not independent of the event: John built a house.
The entailment (22a) may contain both definite and indefinite changes of state.
Incremental themes are affected objects, and it is entailed upon objects that they undergo a definite change of state. The NP ‘the glass’ in (22b) refers to an entity which can be used to measure the quantity of water. The entailments in (22c-e) are corresponding counterparts of the entailments of Proto-Agent (22c-e).
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Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a non-derivational generative framework.
LFG takes the insight of the mapping between the predicate argument structure and the syntactic structure, so that there is an argument structure (a-structure) linking the lexical semantic structure and the syntactic structure of a predicator (Bresnan and Kaberva, 1989; Bresnan and Zaenen, 1990). In order to conduct this device, LFG states two planes of syntactic representation: functional structure (f-structure) and constituent structure (c-structure) (Kaplan and Bresnan, 1982). The c-structure is represented as a tree configuration, and the f-structure forms grammatical information, such as grammatical features (e.g., SUBJ and OBJ), tense, aspect, person, number, etc.
Lexical mapping theory (LMT) is the UG component constraining the linking between a-structure roles and f-structure roles.
Argument functions include SUBJ, OBJ, OBLΘ (oblique function), OBJΘ (secondary objects). They are characterized by two binary distinctive features: [+r]
([+r] and [-r] for restricted and unrestricted) and [+o] ([+o] and [-o] for objective and non objective) (Bresnan, 2001; Her, 2009). Grammatical functions show the features of [r] and [o] as follows.
(23) The features of grammatical functions SUBJ [-r, -o]
OBJ [-r, +o]
OBJθ [+r, +o]
OBLθ [+r, -o]
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Well-formedness constraints, including the Subject Condition: every predicator must have a subject, and Function-Argument Bi-uniqueness: each a-structure role must be associated with a unique function. They are used to ensure that every sentence has a subject and that two arguments cannot be mapped to the same grammatical function (Bresnan, 2001). Dowty (1988) also proposed the following principle and corollaries in order to appropriately map the proto-roles to the grammatical functions.
(24) Argument Selection Principle:
If the predicate has two grammatical functions, subject and object, the argument with the most proto-agent entailments will be mapped to the subject and the argument having the greatest number of proto-patient entailments will be mapped to the object.
(25) Corollary:
If the two arguments have the same number of proto-agent and proto-patient entailments, either one can be mapped to the subject or to the object.
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Chapter 4
Three categories of V-shang
There are at least 3,233 items of V-shang data and 160 types of V-shang collocations of different verbs with shang in the Academia Sinica corpus1 which are the main sources of data for this paper. A search for types of V-shang for eight verb-categories, VCL, VC, VK, VJ, VHC, VG, VF, and VD2, was carried out on search engines in the Academia Sinica corpus. V-shang as Verb-Complement (VC) where V-shang is transitive showed 2,222 items of data, and Verb-Complement-Location (VCL) where V-shang is followed by a location showed 529 items of data, so items from these categories are used as the majority of data in the present study.
This chapter, based on the discussions presented in Chapter 2 and the frameworks
1 Academic Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese (中央研究院現代漢語平衡 語料庫): http://db1x.sinica.edu.tw/cgi-bin/kiwi/mkiwi/mkiwi.sh
2 Word types on the search engines:
VCL (a verb needs location object), VC ( a verb needs an object), VK (a verb attaches to stative verb), VJ (a verb needs two thematic roles, such as <theme, goal>,
<experiencer, goal> and <theme, range>), VHC (intransitive verb), VG (a verb connects the subject and object, such as dang ‘to be’ in wo yao dang ge laoshi ‘I want to be a teacher’), VF (a transitive verb needs the thematic roles <agent, goal>, <agent, goal, theme>), and VD (double object verb).
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introduced in Chapter 3, investigates three types of features of V-shang. The features of the three types of V-shang can be reflected in the collocations of the noun phrases following V-shang. That is, the kinds of noun phrases following V-shang provide the basic division of three categories of V-shang: V-shang Ground, V-shang Patient, and V-shang Extent. The description of the complement NP is based on Talmy (2000)’s motion event frame and Andrew (1985)’s thematic relation. In motion events, the movement of shang may be separated into [+Ground] NP and [-Ground] NP. The basic category is [+Ground] NP with V-shang.
The first section introduces the criteria of categories in V-shang. Section 4.2 4.3, and 4.4 separately discuss the features in each category of V-shang, [V-shang Ground], [V-shang Patient] and [V-shang Extent], based on motion event theory and the research on aspect. They will analyze the characters of the types of noun phrases following V-shang and the features of the orientation of movement indicated by the different categories of V-shang.
4 .1 Criteria of categories in V-shang
From Talmy’s (2000) motion event-frame, motion verbs create motion events and express the movement process from the starting point to the endpoint which is named Ground, so the appearance of Ground is the main criterion for distinguishing whether
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V-shang contains sense of motion or not. Object NPs can be divided into [+Ground]
NPs and [-Ground] NPs. A Ground with shang can be described in dao4… shang
‘arrive to’到…上 to indicate the goal of location; for example, pao-shang shan 跑上 山‘run up onto the mountain’ can transfer into ‘pao dao shan shang’ 跑到山上. Or,
for example, as in (26):
(26) a. 李四 買 了 車票 奔上 火車。
Lisi mai le chepiao ben-shang huoche Lisi buy ASP ticket run train
‘Lisi bought the tickets and got on the train. ’ b. 李四 到 火車 上 了 嗎?
Lisi dao huoche shang le ma?
Lisi on train ASP
‘Has Lisi gotten on the train?’
In contrast, [-Ground] NP may include the object of verbs, quantifiers, and time references. Thematic roles are used to describe the semantic functions of noun phrases with respect to the action of the verb (Dowty, 1991; Andrew, 1985). [+Ground]
feature represents Location; the thematic roles with [-Ground] are Patient or Theme following V-shang.
Objects of [+Patient/Theme] undergo the action and the change of state; that is, they are not ending points of movement but are part of [-Ground] NP. Thus, [-Ground]
NPs can be divided into [+Patient] NPs and [-Patient] NPs. The way to distinguish
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[+Patient] and [-Patient] is to move the NP complement with ba3 in front of V-shang.
The verb must be an action verb which may be a motion verb, and NPs are the complements of the verbs. Furthermore, objects of [-Patient] NP, which are also part of the [-Ground] groups, consist of a time reference, and the quantifiers. And, they do not undergo a change of state and present the ending point of a motion.
Secondly, there are generally two kinds of Ground: concrete and abstract. The concrete Ground, such as the mountain, with V-shang is the prototypical use of V-shang, and it expresses the physical directional movement from the low position to the high position with movement verbs. On the other hand, an abstract Ground represents a goal, such as the final position of the status, so it is like a metaphorical usage, as in fei-shang zhitou ‘become a wife of a rich man’ 飛上枝頭. Directional movement no longer expresses vertical but transverse orientation; for instance, someone may bump into trouble.
Secondly, there are generally two kinds of Ground: concrete and abstract. The concrete Ground, such as the mountain, with V-shang is the prototypical use of V-shang, and it expresses the physical directional movement from the low position to the high position with movement verbs. On the other hand, an abstract Ground represents a goal, such as the final position of the status, so it is like a metaphorical usage, as in fei-shang zhitou ‘become a wife of a rich man’ 飛上枝頭. Directional movement no longer expresses vertical but transverse orientation; for instance, someone may bump into trouble.