Ⅲ. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
3.2 Thematic roles and Lexical Functional Grammar
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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.
Thirdly, in order to analyze the orientation of motion in V-shang, the adverb is used to help to distinguish the feature of [+ Path] or [-Path]. Chen and Kuo (2009) have discussed the motion-verb construction. They utilized Talmy’s theory of motion event to analyze the motion verb constructions in Chinese novels. There are eight constructions of the combination of manner verbs, path verbs and deictic verbs:
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need manner verbs, and V-shang shows the pattern of M+P. M+P+D and M+D, in particular, are two other ways to examine whether V1 in V-shang is a motion verb or not. That is, a verb which can appear with DVC like shang4 ‘up’ 上, xia4 ‘down’ 下, lai2 ‘come’ 來, qu4 ‘go’ 去, qilai ‘upward’ 起來, jinqu ‘get in to’進去, guoqu‘across’ 過去, and xiaqu ‘get down’ 下去, has the feature of directional indication;
hence, it is a motion verb. The descriptions of the adverbials below in (27) are also
used to examine Chinese motion expressions.
(27)
‘He walked over with very rapid and swift steps.’
c. Adverbial clauses 我 沒跑步, 但 走 得 很快, 走進 辦公室 Wo mei paobu dan zou de hen kuai zou jin bangongshi I not run but walk fast go to office
‘I didn’t run, but walked very fast (when I) walked into the office.’
3 M=Manner verbs, P=Path verbs (non-deictic), D=deictic verbs (indicating path).
Manner verbs refer to the way in which a figure carries out a motion. Path verbs refer to the trajectory over which a figure moves. Deitic verbs indicate path relative to the speaker (Slobin, 2004).
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As a verb, either a manner verb or a neutral verb occurs with shang to compose a verb-complement, and shang becomes a predicate implying the sense of ‘path.’
V-shang creates a motion-verb construction and a motion event. That is to say, if shang contains the meaning of path, it is a motion-verb construction. Adverbs which
modify the direction may help to point out the features of shang, like zhizhidi
‘straightly’ 直直地 in the sentences in (28).
(28) a. 李四 直直地 跑上 山 Lisi zhizhidi pao-shang shan Lisi straightly run mountain ‘Lisi ran straight up the mountain’
b. 今天 股市 直直地 衝上 歷史 最高點 jintian gushi zhizhidi chong-shang lishi zui gaodian today stock straightly rose history highest
‘Today, stocks rose straight to the highest point in history.’
c. 張三 把書 直直地 搬上 台 Zhangsan ba shu zhizhidi ban-shang tai Zhangsan ba book straightly move stage
‘Zhangsan moved the book directly on to the stage.’
The sense of ‘directly’ by zhizhidi is not accepted here, because it does not show the orientation of the action. These three examples of V-shang contain different kinds of Ground. (28a) has a concrete ending point; (28b) has an abstract point in Stock, and (28c) shows the way that the book is moved on to the stage. Thus, in order to find the
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directional meaning of shang, an adverb zhizhidi ‘straightly’ 直直地 which modifies the verb to show the upward direction is used to test whether there is a meaning of path in V-shang or not.
Fourthly, since the preceding verb (V1) in V-shang can be the cause of the action, the type of the verb in V-shang is important. Within the relation between the verbs and the aspect, Vendler (1967) proposed four aspectual categories to distinguish the verb types, including (i) states, (ii) activities, (iii) accomplishment, and (iv) achievement, which can be distinguished by three features: dynamic, punctual and telic.
The dynamic feature divides verbs into dynamic verbs and stative verbs. Stative verbs, including seem, know, want and be, are atelic and non-punctual, because there is no inherent duration. Three types of dynamic verbs are distinguished by punctual and telic. ‘Punctual’ verbs can be regarded as instantaneous or as a single point (begin to sing) to differentiate them from those with duration (sing a song). ‘Telic’ represents events with an endpoint. Activity verbs have inherent duration and no particular ending point. Accomplishment descriptions, such as build a house and paint the painting, are not instantaneous, because the ending point is the completion of the
action. Achievement verbs, such as arrive, leave, notice and recognize, point out the beginning or the end of the action (Mourelatos, 1981). Achievement and accomplishment can be grouped together as telic events. The duration of time can be
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tested by adjoining a time phrase like ‘for a while’ or ‘in a week.’ In Talmy’s theory, the motion verb portrays a motion event. Most of the motion verbs are activity verbs, especially physical verbs.
Teng (1964) and Xu (2008) generally classify verbs into activity verbs which perform an action and stative verbs which perform in a non-dynamic way, like xihuan
‘like’喜歡, xiangxin ‘believe’相信, ai ‘love’ 愛, and xiang ‘think’想. A stative verb attaches to zhe 著 rather than to zai 在 in Mandarin Chinese. On the other hand, there are two kinds of inchoative verbs: absolute, such as ‘die’, ‘get sick’ and ‘graduate’ and scalar, such as, ‘improve’ and ‘grow up.’ Inchoative verbs can only be attached to zai 在, and they show the meaning of instant action, without the internal process. In
activity verbs, there are two standard movement verbs: verbs of location including sit, stand, sleep, lie, squat, and kneel and verbs of motion including put, leave, stop, hang,
plant, and move. The verbs of location are intransitive; the verbs of motion are
intransitive. They can attach to the location phrases of zai to display the direction, as
in (29).
(29) a.李四 坐 在 地 上 Lisi zuo zai di shang Lisi sit zai ground on ‘Lisi sat on the ground.’
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b. 李四放書 在 地 上 Lisi fang shu zai di shang Lisi put book zai ground on
‘Lisi put the book on the ground.’
Motion verbs are subcategorized into activity verbs, and they are transitive or intransitive. Intransitive forms of motion verbs have a syntactic feature of collocating with location phrases and a semantic meaning of implying the direction. Transitive forms require the enforcement to move their complement object, so ba3 may precede the NP object with V-shang (Zhang, 1995; Wang, 1995/1999). Moreover, within non-directional meanings, stative verbs and changed verbs are adjoined to shang, and behaviors increase the complexity of the verb argument structures while expressing the verb aspect in the sentences containing V-shang.
According to Teng (1964) and Xu (2008)’s classification of verb types, the prototypical form expressing the directional sense is composed of a motion verb and a noun phrase pointing out the final position or goal. Physical motion verbs are like zou3 ‘walk’ 走, pao3 ‘run’ 跑, ben ‘rush’ 奔, and chong ‘charge’ 衝. Transitive
verbs like tui ‘push’ 推, and ban ‘move’ 搬 also can be collocated with V-shang. Or even stative verbs which perform in a non-dynamic manner, like xihuan ‘like’喜歡 and ai ‘love’ 愛 also can be collocated with V-shang.
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Based on the criteria of classifying V-shang, the following section will separately analyze the categories of V-shang, in view of their NP complements, which have the features of [+Ground], [+Patient] and [-Patient], and the direction of the path expressed by V-shang. Then, the analysis of the preceding verbs in V-shang will be discussed in Chapter 5.
4.2 V-shang Ground
According to the trajector(TR)-landmark(LM) configuration, a physical lower-position landmark (LM) and a physical higher-than-LM position trajectory (TR) are involved as vertical dimensions of space. The higher-than-LM position TR is designated as the prototypical sense of shang in Mandarin Chinese (Tyler and Evans, 2003; Kim, 2005). In a dynamic trajectory, shang shows the movement from a lower-position LM1 to a higher-position LM2. Figure 3 shows that the path or trajectory is a movement with an upward orientation.
Figure 3. The schema of upward orientation of shang adapted from Tyler and Evans (2003)
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Shang portrays that tr, wo ‘I,’ physically moves from the lower-landmark (LM1) to
the higher-landmark (LM2). Complement NP following V-shang reveals the final location of tr (Tyler and Evans, 2003; Kim, 2005). In (30), Wo ‘I’ is tr which has
moved from the lower place (LM1) to the top of the mountain (LM2).
(30) 我爬上山頂了
wo pa-shang shan-ding le I climb-shang mountain top le
“I climbed (up) onto the top of the mountain.”
As the sentence in (30) shows, the tr, wo ‘I,’ follows a trajectory in space with effort by means of climbing elaborated by the verb pa2 ‘climb’ 爬, and finally vertically attains the concrete GOAL, which is coded by shan-ding ‘the top of mountain’ 山頂.
The top of the mountain signals a SURFACE, the nature of which allows the tr to stand firmly. Hence, the concept of ‘vertically attained’ is demonstrated in V-shang (Lu, 2011), and, furthermore, the pattern of the concept is in the form of the profile of
The top of the mountain signals a SURFACE, the nature of which allows the tr to stand firmly. Hence, the concept of ‘vertically attained’ is demonstrated in V-shang (Lu, 2011), and, furthermore, the pattern of the concept is in the form of the profile of