A Comparative Study on the Causative Alternation in Chinese and Japanese
School of Law and Humanities, China University of Mining and Technology, Beijing 100083, China
| Abstract: | This paper introduces the causative and anti-causative alternation in Mandarin Chinese and Japanese respectively. Firstly, the verbs which are allowed to appear in the causative alternation in Mandarin Chinese and Japanese are stable, although they are realized in different manners. In Japanese, the causative alternation is realized through the morpheme markings either from transitivization or intransitivization; in Mandarin Chinese, the resultative verb compounding is usually applicable in the causative alternation, as well as the very rare mono-morphemic verbs, as widely discussed in existing literature. Secondly, the derivational and non-derivational controversy of the causative alternation is introduced, and this paper adopts a non-direct-derivation-relation between the causative and anti-causative alternants in both languages, both of which are derived from a common base: Cause[√Root+Theme]. The [√Root+Theme] base expresses a resultant state, and the Cause predicate introduces a causal relation between a causing event and a resultant state. They only differ in the presence or absence of a Voice projection, which is added in the causative alternant, but lacks in the anti-causative alternant. The function of the eventive head Voice is to introduce an external argument into the causative alternant. The typology of the causative alternation applies in both Mandarin Chinese and Japanese, although the morphemic inflectional properties vary across languages. |
| Keywords: | Chinese; Japanese; Causative; Anti-causative; Alternation |
| DOI: | 10.57237/j.cll.2023.01.001 |
View:
Downloads:
收稿日期: 2022-10-30
接受日期: 2023-03-07
在线出版日期: 2023-03-28
参考文献
| [1] | Borer, H. (1994). The Projection of Arguments. In: Benedicto, E., Runner, J. (eds.) Functional Projections. University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers, vol. 17, pp. 19–47. University of Massachusetts, Amgerst. |
| [2] | Levin, B., Rappaport, H. M. 1995. Unaccusativity: At the Syntax-lexical Semantics Interface. The MIT Press, Cambridge. |
| [3] | Schäfer, Florian. 2008. The Syntax of (Anti-)Causative-External arguments in change-of-state contexts. John Benjamins Publishing Company. |
| [4] | Okamoto, Aya. 2009. Causative-unaccusative alternation in Japanese, English and Chinese. |
| [5] | Alexiadou, A., Anagnostopoulou, E., Schäfer, F. 2006. The Properties of Anti-causative Crosslinguistically. In: Frascarelli, M. (ed.) Phases of Interpretation, pp. 187–211. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. |
| [6] | Lin J. 2004. Event Structure and the Encoding of Arguments: The Syntax of the Mandarin and English Verb Phrase. PhD. Dissertation. The MIT Press, Cambridge. |
| [7] | Li, Charles N. and Thompson, Sandra A. 1981. Mandarin Chinese: a Functional Reference Grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press. |
| [8] | Cheng, Lisa L.-S. and Huang, C.-T. James (1994) On. the Argument Structure of Resultaive Compounds,' in Matthew Chen and Ovid T. -L. Tzeng (eds.), In Honor of William S.-Y. Wang. Piramid Press, Taipei, pp. 187-223. |
| [9] | Volpe, M. 2008. Morphologically Motivated Lexical-Semantic Representations: The Causative Alternation and Change-of - State Verbs in Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995). Lingbuzz/000081. |
| [10] | Dowty, D. 1979. Word Meaning and Montague Grammar. D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht. |
| [11] | Parsons, T. 1990. Events in the semantics of English: A study in subatomic semantics. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. |
| [12] | Piñón, C. 2001. A Finer Look at the Causative-inchoative Alternation. In: Hastings, R., Jackon, B., Zvolenszky, Z. (eds.) Proceedings of SALT 11. CLC Publications, Ithaca. |
| [13] | Doron, E. 2003. Agency and voice: The semantics of the Semantic templates. Natural Languages Semantics 11 (1): 1-67. |
| [14] | Guo, Yin. 2011. A cognitive-functional approach to Chinese and English causative alternations. Ph.d dissertation. |
| [15] | Kratzer, Angelika. 1996. Severing the external argument from the verb. In Phrase structure and the lexicon, ed. Johan Rooryck and Laurie Zaring, 109-137. Dordrecht: Kluwer. |
| [16] | Huang, C. T., Li, Y. H., Li, Y. F. 2009. The Syntax of Chinese. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. |
| [17] | Li, Yafei (1990) On V-V Compounds in Chinese,' Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 8, 177-207. |
